DIGIMAG 45 - JUNE 2009

DIGICULT Digital Art, Design & Culture

Founder & Editor-in-chief: Marco Mancuso Advisory Board: Marco Mancuso, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Claudia D'Alonzo Publisher: Associazione Culturale Digicult Largo Murani 4, 20133 Milan (Italy) http://www.digicult.it Editorial Press registered at Milan Court, number N°240 of 10/04/06.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Monica Ponzini

Raster Noton Shopping Style ..................................................................................... 3 Silvia Bianchi

Mapping Festival .......................................................................................................... 8 Jeremy Levine

The Science And Art Of Complex Systems ............................................................. 11 Valeria Merlini

The Murder Of Crows ................................................................................................ 22 Matteo Milani

Walking In The City With Christina Kubisch .......................................................... 27 Marco Mancuso

The Sound Ecosystems Of Agostino Di Scipio ...................................................... 33 Loretta Borrelli

From Cfu To Funen: Interview With Jakob Jakobsen .......................................... 42 Otherehto

A_ctivism ..................................................................................................................... 49 Gigi Ghezzi

50 Years After Baron Snow’s Two Cultures ........................................................... 54 Silvia Casini

Science Is Sexy: Felice Frankel ................................................................................. 57 Giulia Simi

The Aware And Creative Technology Of Goto10 .................................................. 62

Donata Marletta

The Digital Market Of Elektra .................................................................................. 68 Lucrezia Cippitelli

Imaging Space: Direct Digital Symposium ............................................................ 70 Massimo Schiavoni

Sabrina Muzi. About The Body Without Limits ..................................................... 74 Marco Riciputi

Blender And 3dwithin Nearly‌everybody’s Reach .............................................. 82 Mark Hancock

_augmentology 1[l]0[l]1_:interface Between Two Worlds ................................. 85 Claudia D'Alonzo

Cinemahacking: Interview To Paolo Gioli .............................................................. 89 Francesco Bertocco

Douglas Gordon: The Time Of Narration ............................................................... 98

Raster Noton Shopping Style Monica Ponzini

Byetone), musician as well and part of the Berlin label roster. A platform and a network that does not only consider the music production as a “classic” mark, but as something whose aim is to produce a model of multidisciplinary production transforming the creation of the object from an elegant and minimalist obsession for collection to an absolute material objectification of the audiovisual aesthetics created by its founders and by the artists involved in the project.

Raster Noton was the founding father, and paved the way to loads of other labels in the international scene, probably clearing the ground for the only means of a music label economic survival in the era of the Internet and the peer-to-peer. He suggested to: follow an exceptional and aesthetically well-characterized musical strand, minutely edit the production of the CD, network with one’s own artists and spread the name of the label through concerts and performances in the major festivals and in the best international galleries, crop up among the electronic mass production , and “rise” to an almost mythical condition.

Experimentation. Carsten Nicolai’s (aka alva noto) artistic production, (one of the few artists in the digital art who does not need any presentation) has always been characterized by an element of constant research: thinking about sound frequencies and visuals, digital and minimal aesthetics, where noise and glitch are bound to mathematics and geometric shapes, has gone through an evolution that made him one of the most important, long-established and famous artists in the international electronic scene.

Linearity and constant search for new forms of expression and multimedia also marked the advancing of his audio-visual production label RasterNoton (or better: raster-noton. Archiv für ton und nichtton ), which Cartsen Nicolai has founded and is still editing together with Olaf Bender (aka

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by Bender and Nicolai, consisting of two neon tubes whose brightness varies and reacts to sounds created by the duo). This work follows with a great coherence the research on the physicality of sound, on the various ways of viewing it through digital, material and physical elements, and it was supervised by Carsten Nicolai from the beginning of his career and culminating in important chapters such as Telefunken (2000), Infinite (1997), Mikro Makro (1997), Polar (2000), Spray (2004), Sonic Lumiere (2003), Logic Licht (2001), Snow Noise (2002) and Syn Chron (2004).

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Formed by the merger of the two labels Rastermusic and Noton, Raster-Noton has gathered and as well as produced very different artists joined by the research on sound and its graphic and visual decoding: in addition to Alva Noto and Byetone, among others, we can’t forget William Basinski, COH aka Ivan Pavlov, Ryoji Ikeda, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nibo, Richard Chartier and Carl Michael von Hausswolff.

For this occasion, Olaf Bender and Cartsen Nicolai have also produced a cosy and intimate audio-video performance, with a gradual crescendo of sound and visual elements. We met Carsten Nicolai just before the opening of the exhibition, not only to talk about his work in general (we already talked about it in the article “Carsten Nicolai: the aesthetics of mistake”, on Digimag 18 ‘October 2006, at the première of his new project Xerrox http://www.digicult.it/digimag/articl e.asp?id=423) but to discuss specifically about the show “The Shop”. We are really honoured to have him again in the pages of Digimag.

e-flux, an international network that connects artists, curators and institutions through its web site, presented on 28 May, at their showroom in New York the exhibition “Raster Noton: The Shop”, where the activity of the label is presented in the form of an ideal store, but without the commercial factor. The entire exhibition space was transformed into an active archive showing the label’s life and philosophy, by CDs, covers, publications, sound and the installation “White Line Light.” (a work

Monica Ponzini: This exhibition provides for an overview of the raster-noton activity. How could you 4

define it?

Fragmentation is probably one aspect, but if you see the show, you see that it is not much fragmented. as I already said there’s a kind of continuity. We called it “The Shop” because it has to do with the idea of an archive, which is one of the subtitles of our label

Cartsen Nicolai: We do not perform this kind of shows (“The Shop”) so often, but I must say we have worked a lot up to the present, since we have already created more than 100 works.

Some way, it is nice to see how there is some continuity from our very first works to now. You can see how we have followed a particular line, in terms of music and aesthetic quality, when talking about packaging and design.

Monica Ponzini: Can you talk about the “White Line Light,” which you have created with Olaf Bender?

Cartsen Nicolai: With “White Line Light” we aimed at creating both an installation in itself, and part of a noncommercial “store”, as it exactly happens in this exhibition. We always install it with different positions and we fit it to the space we want to use.

Basically, it connects a few simple elements, we really want to consider.

Its simplicity reveals its purity. We seek the connection between sound and light and we like a very simple industrial aesthetics: in it there are, a number of elements not only belonging to Raster Noton, but also to ourselves as artists.

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Monica Ponzini: On the other hand, your working method was described as “fragmented”. Do you agree with this definition?

Monica Ponzini: And the visual aspect? In your work it is often connected to your sounds …

Cartsen Nicolai: Yes, and I’m glad: I see the word “fragmentation” as a positive term. In terms of sound, we use fragments of sounds rather than “finished” sounds and just ready.

Perhaps because we have a very “microscopic” view of sounds a lot and we work a lot on details.

Cartsen Nicolai: I almost always use this type of connection in my work. If you consider the package design as something graphic, you see that we are interested in this connection since the beginning of our production as

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Raster Noton. Over the years, especially during our performances, we have begun to introduce visuals together with sounds, and now this is a very strong element of our live production.

interested in the application of interactive media to art. Have you changed your mind? And as regards your label, what role does the Internet play in the distribution, that is what does it do to reach your audience?

Monica Ponzini: And in this case it seems that you tend to use the linearity, mathematics and the “grid” in a predominant way…

Cartsen Nicolai: I am still convinced that it is difficult to work on the Internet as an artistic and interactive medium , I’m not a big fan of the Network in this sense. But I am convinced that the Internet is a fantastic tool for communication and distribution. We all use it in our everyday life: sometimes it is some sort of library or archive, or a communication and shareware means. I see it more as a means of information and communication, but not as an artistic springboard. I work with the Internet so much that I am in need of working with “physical” products, or printed items, and not always and only of working on a computer screen…

Cartsen Nicolai: I think every artist uses very simple “strategies”. Basically we use simple geometric shapes, 2D aesthetics, a lot of graphics. And this probably comes from a geometrical approach that is linked to our background based on mathematics and optics, and that are strong elements of inspiration for us. But at the same time we use elements with which we deal every day and that pervade our everyday life.

http://www.raster-noton.net/ http://www.alvanoto.com/ http://www.carstennicolai.com/

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http://www.myspace.com/benderby etone

Monica Ponzini: What is your relationship with Internet? A few years ago, you told me you weren’t 6

http://www.e-flux.com/

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Mapping Festival Silvia Bianchi

Spoutnik, and Le Zoo / Usine.

Focussing on vj’s needs from the constant presence of technicians to the careful chiose of headlights and mixers vga is an accuracy which can be managed with such sensitivity only by people who has already stayed on the other side of the consolle. In other words, Mapping is a festival for audiovisual vjs organized by vjs, and the difference stands out a mile.

The last Mapping Festival edition took place from the 8th to the 17th of May in the fervent city of Geneva .

Focussing above all on visual aspects,

On Friday night, it hosted some of the most interesting woman artists working in the audiovisual field, with particular care for projects quality and variety. The night was opened by the Laptopurus project, i.e. a completely female platform created and supported by three women with a great organizational talent: Maite Cajaraville, Shu Lea Cheang e Blanca Regina. During the winter of 2008 they engaged in this international project which aims at taking on the ring woman vjs from all over Europe .

The meeting was presented in Geneva for the second time, after having been organized in Paris during the exhibition Visionarre. It aims at bringing this funny and curious battle in the different hosting festivals, making invited vjs compete with the

this festival is different from the many others of electronic music which animate the Swiss city. Also this year it confirmed to be not only an incredibile showcase fot the vjing international scenery, but also an evidence of the real Swiss style in regard of technical organization and rich program.

I could happily take part as artist in the first festival day and I remained open-mouthed in realizing how the developers of Module8 are the same infallible event organizers able to successfully manage such a rich festival all over Geneva citycentre, using many different spaces including the Bâtiment d’art contemporain, the Galerie Labo, L’écurie, Le Cabinet, Le

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local ones. It is very easy: suffice is to join the competition and challenge the profis.

perfect audiovisual festival.

On Friday night artists as Strap On Dildos (F) Miss Duckin (CH), Raquel Meyers (ES) e Etepetete (AU) played at the festival. The latter are a group of djettes e vjettes founded in 2007 by three young Austrian girls who shook up the Zoo with their funny selection and their totally coloured visuals, playing the best record news from electro clash to funk through nu-rave music. In other words: an explosing threesome we hope to host soon in Italy .

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The privileged guest at the festival was the Berliner Soniriot , who competed in the battle with a very original set in whicht graphics and pictures melted with a cyber punk but at the same time humorous look. All resulted in a show full of adrenalin in which different vjs challenge one another in “one to one� battles and the public voted live electing the protagonist of a real ring with ropes and maxiscreens all around.

Raquel Meyers is instead a Spanish artist with a really incredibile talent, who lived in the last years between Bilbao and Madrid and has recently arrived in Berlin. Raquel took part in this festival edition with her newest set which joins the 8 bits aesthetics with foto-animation, creating a really uncommon narrative and visual pathway. During her career she created videoclips and vj sets for many of the most important 8 bits artists all over the world, among them Glomag, BubblyFish and Goto80. She

The extraordinary Genevan Zoo Club , famous for a long time for its clubbing activity, was the ideal location for this show and for the festival night life, thanks to a formidabile audio system and more than 16 screens. The club is a real self-managed centre with a bar, a cinema, a concert hall, a restaurant and bedrooms for the invited artists:

was also part and parcel of the group ENTTER. In the last years she attended many international shows like A maze Festival. Transmediale (de), Matadero Rec (es), A, FIB Heineken (es) and she has also been hosted in centres like the Namsan Drama Center (ko), LEV (es), Laboral centro de arte (es) , La casa encendida

no better location for a wellcoming and at the same time technically 9

(es) , demonstrating to be one of the most interesting artists in the European 8 bits scenary.

On Saturday night the privileged guests were great names coming from the Kompact world, i.e.

Burger/Voigt live set , Tobias Thomas dj’s set he is a historic member of the stable from the early ’90s and the two vjs from Bruno Tait’s and Okinawa 69′s school . A showcase with an incredible teutonic, plain and faultless style.

During the long festival week, the Mapping Festival stage hosted also artists like The Bug, Videogeist, vJ aNYONE and many others who gave a complete overview on the Modul8 software world, which changed the life to many vjs and mac users. It would be very nice to tell you what else happened at the festival, but we prefer to leave you with a little bit of curiosity. So, visit the Web site and don’t lose the next edition: a Vjing festival with very few equal.

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On Saturday there was the exciting Modul8 workshop which is the real festival meeting point. Later on the festival moved to its second location, the Batiment d’art contemporain , where people could enjoy and play with the irresistible Reactable . They could then assist to the concert of The Proteins (CH) , who stired up everyone with their strong rock’n’roll accompanied by an elaborated video installation realized by Klif (CR).

http://www.mappingfestival.com

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The Science And Art Of Complex Systems Jeremy Levine

From this perspective object-based art is akin to classical particles, while interactive media art is more like the quantum particles whose form is always evolving. In both cases our intuitive understanding of “objects” with discrete boundaries, separated by space is challenged by our experience of non-locality and entanglement, both real and perceived. In both cases, the choices made by human beings are injected into the structure of the system under observation, resulting in a single complex system.

This text is the first of a 5 essay series, written by Amercian interaction designer and theorician Jeremy Levine entitled “Products of Negotiation & Spaces of Possibility: Quantum Systems and Interactive Media Art”. The text was translated in Italian for Digimag, according to the author, and first pubblished for an art-critic magazine

Introduction It is important to clarify in exactly what way interactive media art and quantum systems function as “complex systems” rather than merely “systems”. For science writer Philip Ball, the misuse of complexity has lead to a visceral reaction and a warning.“When I hear the word “complexity,” I don’t exactly reach for my hammer, but I suspect my eyes narrow. It has the dangerous allure of an incantation, threatening to acquire the same blithe explanatory role

Within quantum mechanics, “reality” is an evolving state that includes the interaction of the observer as a component of the system under observation. The same thing can be said of any interactive work of media art. Human behavior contributes complexity to any interactive system of which it is a component, whether it reside in quantum space or cyberspace.

that“adaptation” once did in biology” [1] 11

Ball’s frustration stems from the inconvenient fact that there is no single universally accepted definition for complexity or complex systems.

Stephen Wilson echoes Ball’s sentiments, “Artists and those outside the sciences toss these terms around carelessly, understanding their precise meaning is useful in considering artists who are inspired by the theories” [2].

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An alternative to the biological model for complexity and complex systems emerges from information theory where complexity does not depend on a large number of moving parts.

Instead the emphasis is on the “dynamics causing the change of the system (state)”[3]. The info-theoretic approach is not concerned with the number of variables, as much as it is “the fact that these variables are all interrelated.”[4]. This leads to the emergence of holistic properties.

Complex systems have to be understood holistically because they “exhibit behavior on scales above the level of the constituent components” [5].

From the perspective of biology, complexity is a product of living systems, which are assembled from a large number of parts. It is the interactions of these parts that cause the emergence of the novel behaviors commonly associated with complexity—I.E. selforganization. It is no surprise that, “life”–as a form of self-organization- is often held up as the model of complexity…and holism.

It is for this reason that the words “organic” and “holistic” are often used synonymously. Digital art and complex living systems both depend on a code based structure: computer code or DNA. Both types of code act as instructions that provide the organizational unity to their systems.

The emergent behavior of complex systems is hard to comprehend, because it does not come apart easily under analytic reduction. As physicist Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi has points out, “we continue to struggle with systems for which the interaction map between the components is less ordered and rigid” [6]. Interactive media art and quantum particles under observation are two examples of such systems.

Herbert Simon‘s “How Complex Are Complex Systems?” characterizes complex systems in similar terms, but

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puts an emphasis on complexity as a relative term.“Systems in which there is much interdependence among the components are generally regarded as more complex than systems with less Interdependence among components. Systems that are undecidable may be regarded as complex in comparison with those that are decidable” [7].

connected than classical mathematics allows [9]. Entangled states of quantum systems, like the interactions of all complex systems, cannot be reduced to a simple linear equation. A linear system is predictable because it breaks apart easily into separate components “that can be analyzed separately and solved, and finally, all the separate answers can be recombined—literally added back together–to give the right answer to the original problem. In a linear system, the whole is exactly equal to the sum of the parts” [10].

This is the antithesis of a complex system, in which the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts. “The whole system has to be examined all at once, as a coherent entit” [11]. This is the state of holism that we find in quantum systems.

On the other hand, physicist Masanori Ohya‘s definition of complex systems digs into the texture of complexity as a hierarchical structure.“(1) A system is composed of several elements. The scale of the system is often large but not always, in some cases one. (2) Some elements of the system have special (self) interactions (relations), which produce a dynamics of the system. (3) The system shows a particular character (not sum of the characters of all elements) due to (2). ….A system having the above three properties is called “complex system”.

The ”complexity” of such a complex system is a quantity measuring that complexity, and its change describes the appearance of the particular character of the system” [8].

Photo: entangled photons

2.0 Entanglement, Complexity, and Non-linearity .

The entangled state cannot be considered as two separate electrons prepared independently. Instead, entangled states are more intimately

Entanglement of distant components can give rise to what Ilya Prigogine calls the “long range order” [12] of complex systems. Prigogineʼs ʻlong 13

range orderʼ is a metaphor for the linking between nodes in any system or network. However, the entanglement of two distant elements in a quantum system, like the linking of two spatially separated nodes in a network, does not yet give us complexity. For that we need to “move beyond structure and topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along those links” [13].

)[14].

When we combine two systems capable of complex behavior, the result is a new system: an entangled system. Though entanglement is normally used to describe quantum systems, it is also apt metaphor for our encounters with interactive art: the entanglement of two systemshuman and non-human- creates a third system. Entanglement is a metaphor for the interdependence of the components of any system.

The entanglement of two or more sub-systems produces the non-linear behavior we associate with complex systems. Entanglement as a “throughput” function results in a geometric expansion in the state space that the quantum system can explore. The capacity for the nonlinear exploration of possible outcomes is, another layer in the connective tissue between quantum systems, complex systems, and interactive art.

From the macroscopic perspective of classical physics, you and the chair you are sitting on are distinct objects separated in space. However, from quantum perspective, you and the chair are two interacting systems of energy. From the quantum perspective, [3] your wave functions are entangled and impossible to separate. From the quantum perspective, you and the chair are a single complex system. Again it all boils down to a matter of perspective: macro or micro, classical or quantum.

If we cannot Norbert Weiner achieve, as cyberneticist says: “a sufficiently loose coupling with the phenomena we are studying,” [15] then we must consider ourselves as part of that phenomena—that system.

[There is a] dramatic discrepancy between the number of states available to a quantum system and the number of states available to its classical counterpart. Crudely speaking, the classical counterpart can occupy any one of a complete set of orthogonal quantum states, whereas the quantum system can occupy not only the orthogonal states, but also any linear superposition of the orthogonal states. (Carlton Caves 14

that interacting unities undergo in the course of their interactions without loss of identity…however, coupling leads also the generation of a new unity that may exist in a different domain from the domain in which the componentcoupled entities retain their identity” [17].

Photo: Eduardo Kac

This new unity is a single interacting system with well-defined “boundary conditions”. Thus quantum systems and interactive art systems exist in multiple domains as a result of strong coupling that produces a recognizable structural unity over time. The continuity of organizational integrity over time is emblematic of all complex systems. The element of “time” is critical in our understanding of how the human agent affects those systems in which it plays a dynamic and constructive role. The very notion of dynamics or “change” must be registered with respect to both space and time. A project like Kac’s “Uriaparu” has an existence as an autopoetic system because of the strong coupling of digital and human components, though each retains a level of independence.

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Interactive New Media Art as Complex System Eduardo Kac’s “”Uirapuru” [16] is an installation that consists of a telerobotic blimp that can be controlled by both visitors to the gallery and remote participants linked via the net. The telerobotic blimp floats over a forest of robotic birds that sing in response to the networked traffic, as it streams a live feed of audio-video onto the net. All the participants merge in a virtual space of a VRML forest. Such a network of interactions, in both physical and digital space, cannot be understood as an art “object”, but is much more akin to a complex system.

Of course, the notion of entanglement applies to our phenomenological encounter with any aesthetic system: painting, sculpture, or video. The medium is irrelevant. However, for non-interactive art, this entanglement is limited to level of cognition rather

In the monumentally important “Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living” Chilean philosophers of science, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, define coupling “as a result of the mutual modifications 15

than physical action. Our entanglement at the cognitive level does not cause the aesthetic system to physically respond or change in any observable way. On the other hand, our interaction with quantum particles and interactive art occurs at the physical or haptic level. In both cases, our interaction with the nonhuman systems under investigation leads to a strong coupling that has non-linear effects on that system.

to fully quantify. Our inability to fully predict the outcomes of quantum behavior and the output of interactive art is one the defining features as complex systems.

“The basic principle is feedback. The artifact/observer system furnishes its own controlling energy: a function of an output variable (observer’s response) is to act as an input variable, which introduces more variety into the system and leads to more variety in the output (observer’s experience)” [19].

A complex system that includes the human agent as an entangled component is capable of an even greater range of behavior than those systems that are not. Non- linearity, as defined by Norbert Weiner in his seminal work, “Cybernetics”, is the result of any “combinations of functions other than addition with constant coefficients” [18].

Given that one of these “functions” is human behavior, as is in the case of interactive art and quantum systems, then we can be sure there is nothing “constant” about the coefficients.

Equally, there is nothing linear about the outcomes (measurements or visual display) that result form of our entanglement with works of Interactive art and quantum systems. The emergence of non-linear behavior through the entanglement of the components is a feature of all complex systems, but human creativity is a non-linear multiplying function that is impossible

The installation project “bb write” [20] by the artistic duo known as Limitazero consists of four linked Blackberry devices which turn the email messages sent by visitors into an audio visual environment, “dynamic and reactive like a single organism” [21]. Without human input “bb” has a rather mundane existence. The complex behavior of “bb” emerges from it’s connections to the networked human components who participate in the system

Photo: Claudia D’Alonzo 16

non-linear behavior of biological systems…formerly known as “living things”. L-Garden allows the visitor to input numbers into various variables that control the growth and reproduction of digital life forms which evolve on the screen. Like all open complex systems a work of interactive art such as “L-Garden” is physically sensitive and responsive in a way that a closed system, such as a Rothko painting, is not. Like all complex systems, “LGarden”, exhibits nonlinear behavior.

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Interactivity, Permeability, and the Network

“Interactivity thus radically transforms relations of man and machines….A hybridization then appears between the work and its receiver. It associates a “human subject” and a machine in an intimate way and sets up an absolutely unprecedented relationship between man and manmade automatic artifacts” [22].

All systems can be categorized on a sliding scale of interactivity based on their relative permeability to ʻoutsideʼ input. A living organism sits at the far end of the openness spectrum, whereas a rock sits at the other end.

In terms of art, we can say a painting whose aesthetic properties were fixed in advance by the artist, with the intent that they remain unchanged, is a closed system. On the other hand, interactive new media, which exchanges information, matter, and energy with the visitor, is an open system.

“Small changes in the rules can cause large effects in the output yet still retain overall functionality. A process similar to the L-system seems to be the effector of growth and form patterns in nature” [25]. (Schindling) “L-Garden” is an open system, at least compared to a Rothko painting, but it’s “openness” to a range of input possibilities– is relatively circumscribed compared to a project such as “Text Rain” [26] by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv. Visitors to “Text Rain” interact with animated letters projected on a wall, inhabiting a hybrid space that is both physical and digital. The visitor’s body becomes a digitized presence in the wall to which the falling letters react.

“Text Rain” allows a nearly unlimited range of creative expression by the visitor, as they construct words,

“The role of the artist in interactive art is not to encode messages unidirectionally but to define the parameters of the open-ended context in which experiences will unfold” [23]. (Eduardo Kac) Eva Schindling’s “L-Garden” [24], uses interactivity to generate/emulate the 17

sentences, or pure nonsense.

In a complex system the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts. “The whole system has to be examined all at once, as a coherent entity” [28].

Epistemologically speaking, complexity and all “emergent phenomena represent a challenge to a science based on strict reductionism” [29].

Within the parameters of the artist’s designed software, Margot Lovejoy’s “Turns” and Warren Sack’s project “Agonistics” (http://artport.whitney.org/gatepage s/artists/sack/) create an aesthetic experience out of complex networked interactivity. Christiane Paul describes both art works as systems in which the visitor becomes both producer and consumer of content.

The Internet, like a quantum system, is a dynamic structure (as opposed to the static nature of a painting or a classic particle), which reflects the interactions of the human element within ʻits causal structureʼ as it evolves. As physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has eagerly notes, “The finding that real networks are rapidly evolving dynamical systems has catapulted the study of complex networks into the arms of physicists…”[30]. New media art that utilizes networked components to receive input from remote human participants is not unlike a quantum system that is probed by a physicist with their experimental apparatus.

Many new media artists share with quantum physicists an interest in the interactive dynamics of complex systems.

“While both Turns and Agnostics enable participation and filtering on the basis of rules that are established by the artists (and the algorithms they use) and can be performed by participants, they create an enhanced awareness of an individual’s “positioning,” be it in a social context or in the ways they express their opinion” [27]

“Artists who focus on underlying algorithms or systems are in some ways working with methods more common in the sciences and engineering, than art. They are attempting to understand underlying

Photo: Eva Schindling .

Conclusion

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principles and then to apply or extend them” [31].

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Notes:

“Measurement does not passively reveal the already existing attributes of a quantum systems, but it changes the probability distribution for future events as well as what actually exists” [32]. At the same time the act of measurement changes our own probability distribution. What we learn from an observation— the information obtained— affects how we think and consequently how we act. Interactive media art and quantum particles challenge our understanding of objectivity by revealing and exploiting the inescapable and reciprocal effects of the subject upon the object. This relationship is the basic unit of a system.

1 . Philip Ball, “Material Witness: Designing with Complexity”, (Nature Materials, 3:78, 2004).

2 . Stephen Wilson, “Information Arts: Intersections of Arts, Science and Tech” (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002), 209.

3 . Masanori Ohya, “Complexity in Quantum System and its Application to Brain Function”, ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/04062 25 ), 30 Giu 2004, 2.

4 . Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Introduction to Claude Elwood Shannon’s, ” The Mathematical Theory of Communication”, (The University of Illinois Press ,1949) 4.

The aesthetic experience of a work of interactive art, like the output of a quantum experiment is a product of the relationship between components: one of which is human.

Our role as active participants inside each system introduces a non-linear, unpredictable, input that produces a

5 . Wilson, 209.

6 . Albert-Laslo Barabasi, “Linked”, (Penguin Books, New York, 2003), 238.

predictable outcome: complexity.

7 . Herbert Simon, “How Complex are Complex Systems?”, (Philosophy of Science Association, Volume 2, 1976) 1-2.

8 . Ohya, 1.

9 . Parafrasando Leonard Susskind,

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“The entangled state means that when we measure one thing we discover something about the other.

Here again we see the importance of information theory. The exchange of information is an interaction with real consequences for physical matter.”

107 18 . Norbert Weiner, “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”, (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1948), x.

19 . Roy Ascott, “Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness”, (University of California Press, 2007)

10 . Steven Strogatz, “Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order”, (Hyperion Books, New York, 2003),181.

11 . Strogatz, 182.

20 . http://limiteazero.net/bb_write/inde x.html

12 . Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, “Exploring Complexity”, (W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1939), 11.

21 . limitazero, http://limiteazero.net/bb_write/inde x.html 22 . Edmond Cuchot, “Media Art: Hybridization and Autonomy”, (Questo scritto è stato presentato in occasione della conferenza REFRESH!, la prima conferenza internazionale su media art. scienze e tecnologia, Banff Center, 29 Set – 4 Ott 2005, 5.

13 . Albert-Laslo Barabasi, “Linked”, (Penguin Books, New York, 2003), 102.

14 . Carlton Caves, “Brief Research Description”, (1o Dic 2005) ( HTTP :// INFO . PHYS . UNM . EDU / CAVES / RESEARCH . HTML ), 1.

15 . Norbert Weiner, “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”, (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1948), 163.

23 . Eduardo Kac, http://www.ekac.org/Telepresence.a rt._94.html , 2.

24 . HTTP :// EVSC . NET / V 6/ HTM / LGARDEN . HTM

16 . Eduardo Kac, http://www.ekac.org/uirapuru.html

25 . Schindling, HTTP :// EVSC . NET / V 6/ HTM / LGARDEN . HTM

17 . Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela “Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living”, (D. Reidel Publishing, Dordrecht, Holland, 1980),

26 . HTTP :// WWW .

CAMILLEUTTERBACK . COM / TEXTRAIN . HTML 20

27 . Christian Paul, “Digital Art / Public Art: Governance and Agency in the Networked Commons”, (nelle edizioni di Sandra Braman e Thomas Malaby), Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace, First Monday, Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, Special Issue #7, November 2006), 6.

ESU . EDU / PHYSICS / LARRABEE /P APERS /M ETANEXUS 2007. PDF ), 17.

30 . Barbasi, 225.

31 . Stephen Wilson, “Information Arts”, (MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2002) 337.

32 . Tarja Kallio-Tamminen “Quantum Physics: The Role of Human Beings within the Paradigms of Classical and Quantum Physics” (Academic Dissertation, facoltà delle arti dell’università di Helsinki), 278.

28 . Strogatz, 182.

29 . David Larrabee, “A Reductivism Based Challenge to Strong Emergence”, (URL: HTTP :// WWW .

21

The Murder Of Crows Valeria Merlini

presented in the “works of music from visual artists.” organized by “Freunde der gute Musik Berlin in 1999, with the collaboration of Nationalgallerie, and since 2002 with the festival of electronic music and contemporary Berlin” Märzmusik “.

“The murder of crows” on display from 14 March to 17 May 2009, is primarily a sound art work, constructing an environment from extracts of musical compositions and a cantata. Due to its linear structure and the perceptual conditions placed on the users, the installation may be associated with an audio narration of which is done through 98 speakers, spread throught the space of the gallery. The issue presented is a reflection on fear and terror of contemporary society, where the loss of reason causes madness, disasters and atrocities.

Until a few days ago it was possible to visit the installation “The murder of crows” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in the main hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, a museum dedicated to contemporary art.

The two Canadian artists, known for their multimedia projects, which combine sculptural, visual, installation / sound and narrative elements, have been working together since the mid 90s to develop a poetics based on the real game between perception and

The staging is reached across a curtain of red curtains, which separates the environment from the exhibition of the Museum, which was an invitation for viewers and listeners to enter the environment built by the artists. In the central nave of the main hall is you can visually perceive the

illusion (see also ‘ article by Barbara Samson – Cardiff-Miller: the evocative power of sound “, Digimag 23 – http://www.digicult.it/digimag/articl e.asp?id=818). The installation was originally commissioned by Thyssen – Bornemisza Contemporary Art in Vienna for the Biennale of Sydney

essence of the installation: a small red table which supports a

2008, and on this occasion was 22

Monstruoso” (The sleep of reason produces monsters), by Francisco de Goya extracted from the series “Caprichos”. The sleep of reason is didactic, represented by a table that has supported the cone of the gramophone, which is widespread voice of Janet Cardiff. The show generated from sleep, symbolized by Goya with creatures of the night that oppress the figure of the sleeper, are translated by the two artists with the story of three nightmares, whose set design and sound, spread by many speakers, enhance the emotional impact. Like Goya, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller criticized the society in which they live to portray its folly, stupidity and arrogance.

grammaphone, which starts from a semicircle and develops into a certain number of sessions. Some are employed by speakers, while others are let free. Once occupied by the users, these are surrounded by the sounds broadcast. The audio speakers arranged on multiple levels (resting the land, placed on chairs, on pedestals and suspended in air), followed by the semicircular provision in the central area and then thin out.

The audio narrative has a linear structure: it has a beginning and an end. The entire composition is structured around the story of three nightmares, and ends with a lullaby, sung by the same artist on the music composed by George Bures Miller, as if it were an attempt by artists to reassure both themselves and listeners. The three industries are telling nightmares of death, of the atrocities caused by the physical and psychological torture in a prison and the consequences of war. The protagonist’s nightmares are the same as Janet Cardiff’s. His role is that of passive observer who undergoes emotional violence of his dreams without being able to react. His

.

This distribution in space seems to refer to the license installation. “The murder of crows” is an English expression used to indicate both a flock of ravens, and their ritual of singing in a circle around the corpse of a “companion”. The relationship between the title and the organization of the scenic area helps to describe the funereal vision of two artists on our society.

A second reference, in both the explicit content in the staging, the press is “El sueño de la razón produce 23

emotional state transpires from dormant and suffered tone of voice and the narrative which is reinforced by short pauses and tired breaths, barely able to externalise the terror experienced.

sound sources which are recognisable according to their intensity and their composition, reinforcing the atmosphere of the story. Sometimes they support the voice, to make it less distinguishable, as in the orchestra of sounds produced by machines in factories whose uproar underlines the heaviness of the incubator. Other times they insert natural elements (like aquatic environments), which suggest the intimacy of a show.

Victims nightmares are predominantly children: children who supply the machinery of a factory with his meat in an atmosphere full of blood, children marching like chained slaves, who suffer abuse and mutilation by the military. The nightmare is to miss the human element, of which there were only the signs, the consequences of the brutality described: a leg mutilated by bombs exploded, devoid of his body.

The musical compositions are used in installation of Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter, Miller of Orion, by Aleksandr Aleksandrov, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Their role is to enhance the dramatic content, although in some cases their association was questionable. In the case of mixing between different tracks “Bad Foot March” (Tilman Ritter, Orion Miller, Janet Cardiff and Bures Miller), who despite being an original composition by the ironic tone, if not insignificant, is always a triumphant military and “The Sacred War “(by Aleksandr Aleksandrov), a Soviet song for the control of oppressors, written in 1941 to the invasion German, put on a par with the two tracks (albeit with the intention to express the aberration of the war), seemed risky choice if not inappropriate.

The speeches strengthen the emotional state of the voice, and scenographically contextualize individual dreams. The audience is surrounded by the sounds.

.

Within the composition of the sound you can grasp some references to the security that gives its name. The

These environmental collages stimulate associations generated by 24

environmental factors that have initiated the audio story, the cry of the ravens, are perceived by speakers suspended in the air. Their lament becomes stronger at the turn of the second and third nightmare, where their presence and their numbers are acoustically portraits by wing beats and the frequency of croaks, a way to a dreary funeral hymn.

audience (standing, sitting on the steps, lying on the ground), but almost always keeping the provision in a semicircle, facing the cone of the gramophone, in this way, the set design proposed by artists.

Even in the lullaby that closes the installation you can find the explicit ravens: title “Did Crows Fly (Kathmandu Lullaby)” and in the text, which invites to relax and try to sleep, knowing that with the awareness of ‘ experience, the sleep is not easy.

“Crows did fly / Through the sky / I hear their cries / Strange lullaby / Close your eyes and try to sleep …”

The lullaby, that seeks to placate the souls, is a composition of music particularly sweet, and in its arrangement maintains a sense of bitterness and heaviness.

.

Few have walked among the speakers or sound chosen a point of listening to far from that situation collection.

Perhaps the dominance of the figure of a voice that guides the perceptual experience of listeners, contrivance necessary for the functionality of the installation, the exploration of the distribution are among the speakers, seemed limited.

The use of the many speakers for sound spatialization, in my opinion, was excessive for a successful

Orchestral compositions in every single sound source (instruments and voices) was assigned to one of the audio speakers arranged in a semicircle, which attracts a possible association with orchestral provision, but from track to track the relationship between the individual

installation. The visitors sat on special wooden folding chairs, were able to enjoy the aural environment, maintaining the exclusivity of that time to listen and suffer physically, such as Janet Cardiff has suffered from nightmares, the intensity of that experience. Other users have preferred to find more points of

instruments and speakers varied.

Given also the large deployment of 25

audio speakers, not fully able to grasp the criterion adopted to spread the sounds, except for the sounds of birds (crows and gulls) diffused from speakers suspended in the air. Overall I believe that the effectiveness of the installation, its scenic and emotional impact would have affected the choice of a smaller spread.

of our society using clear arguments, told in a dream-like way, which I found nevertheless superficial.

By reinforcing the innocence of the children involved, they artists play a game with our emotions that is not too far from the spectactularisation of tragedy conducted by the mass media. Perhaps it would have been more interesting for the two artists to take a more critical perspective rather than simply using a contemporary situation of general and widespread violence in the society around us.

I would like also to criticise the venue of performance. An environment so large and bright has created a certain distance with the personal and intimate atmosphere. Surely a more intimate and collected venue, like the exhibition space in Sydney for example, would have been more appropriate. Indeed, the heat caused by the presence of wood, the main material with which it was constructed and the presence of fine openings, which allowed the light to penetrate into without being overly intrusive, had reinforced that sense of recollection and intimacy so much desired by artists.

http://www.cardiffmiller.com http://www.tba21.org http://www.musikwerke-bildender-k uenstler.de www.freunde-guter-musik-berlin.de http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de

“The murder of crows� is however, a huge installation and well kept. The choice of artists to show the brutality

www.maerzmusik.de

26

Walking In The City With Christina Kubisch Matteo Milani

the German sound artist is much more varied and it has started many years ago: in the 1970′s for example, she had many performances, even if she has always declared to be “unhappy with the predetermined or limited time for the audience to take advantage of the “works”.

Also for this reason, Christina Kubisch has always desired to do something more open, where people could manage their own time, without stopping too long in front of the work of art or the artist himself. Still today, her work is tied to different elements, and resumes some interests related to the work with light, coming from her experiences with theatre and dance.

Light has in fact for Christina Kubisch the same qualities of sound, being a non-material phenomenon that can, and has to be, used as a narrative element; sound and light are for the artist two interlaced elements, so that the first can be used for the visualization of the second (like in the case of ultraviolet light, normally not visible), and vice versa (like in her most renown work, ” Licht Himmel “, 2006, which she created for the magnificent ex-gasometer of the city of Berlin).

Christina Kubisch, one of the most important sound artists on the European scene, began to work in 2003 on a project called “Electrical Walks”. This project uses custom-built headphones which transduce electromagnetic fields into audio signals, through an interaction between force fields which allow the audience to listen to a concert of ambient sounds in public spaces specifically projected.

Christina Kubisch‘s activity consists therefore in mapping a territory, in order to detect hot spots where audio signals are especially strong or interesting. The audience wearing the headphones takes part this way to the discovery of new acoustic spaces, by means of an aural itinerary through a thick net of electromagnetic information which are invisible and omnipresent. Actually, the activity of 27

Christina Kubisch lived in Milan from 1973 to 1987, and our encounter with her took place at the Palazzo della Triennale , during the Milan show of her touring project called “Electrical Walks”, invited by the gallery O’ and

by Die Schachtel for the project realized for InContemporanea and Uovo performing arts festival, which I thank for their collaboration they gave me for this interview.

Electronic Music with Angelo Paccagnini . At the end of my studies at the Mila Conservatory, I started a much more personal and effective research, attending for 2 years night courses in Electronics. During these courses, I discovered a telephonic amplifier, a small cube, from which came curious sounds. This cube had inside some coils, and it amplified the magnetic sounds close by. Fascinated by this system, I had 50 special cubes built, and with them I created my first installations.

Sometimes at night I go through electronics catalogs and ask myself what I can change, subvert, using some components in an improper manner. Then I discovered headphones. I had them built in Bologna , after having projected them with an engineer. I still use them, only the internal components are different, but the exterior of the headphones is authentic, dates back to the first years of the 1980′s. Obviously, the listening is easier than with the cubes: it is more comfortable now to go around with wireless headphones. It is interesting to see how people move, some run around in the space, some go around slowly: the more people move around, the more interesting are the things they hear. Each movement of the head produces big changes in timber and amplitude to the sound people listens to through the headphones.

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Matteo Milani: Christina, could you tell us about your background, and how you arrived, through your career, to conceive the “Electrical Walks” project?

Christina Kubisch: When people asks me what I am, what do I do, I always struggle to answer. I am an artist, a composer, I work with magnetic inductance, but I also write pieces for other musicians. I am a performer, I draw. It’s hard to define me. I was a flautist, I studied Composition with

Franco Donatoni at the G.Verdi Conservatory of Milan, and also 28

Matteo Milani: This project is an important document to understand the state of electromagnetic saturation on our planet, it is a study on the “invisible” noise pollution

experience I could expand both aspects, documenting them through pictures as well as video: lighting systems, transformers, ATMs , electronic security systems, surveillance cameras, computers, antennas, navigation systems, cash registers… the city itself can become a concert.

Christina Kubisch: In every city, especially in the big ones, an incredible number of electromagnetic waves is hidden; they’re everywhere, we can’t hear them but they’re here!

Everyday there’s a bigger amount of digital communication on one side, and all the security systems on another, and they all bear substantial magnetic fields. I began to plan routes in the big cities, just when I started to receive in my headphones disturbances I couldn’t analyze (very strange buzzes & rhythms): actually, for some years (since the beginning of the 1990′s) I had to stop doing my walks because my gear was broken and I could repair it only with the help of a sponsor. In 1999 I found the sponsor, but during those few years of interruption, the world of magnetic fields had grown exponentially! For this reason, I decided to use those disturbances like sounds to explore: one of the first cities I explored was Tokio . I also gave my headphones to Alvin Lucier , who was there for a festival, he had a long walk with them and than he told me: “This is a concert!”

The oldest sounds (trams, train stations), the ones dating back to the last century, are also the most musical. This is what I define “Electromagnetic Anthropology”, in the sense that each and every station has its own distinctive sound, usually connected to the date of its construction. The Stazione Centrale in Milan , for example, is fantastic, I almost got crazy when I went there, and I will be back soon to do some more recordings! In Milan you can actually hear the trams from far away, not only when the listener is close by.

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The city is both an individual and globalized element, and with this

Matteo Milani: Are there places where you actively look for “hidden” sounds, 29

and others where you instead wait for aural information which renew periodically?

Christina Kubisch: All the sounds I record with my headphones are so interesting that I don’t need to transform them much. I mainly work with Pro Tools for editing and pitchshifting. Besides, I use filters in the frequency domain, with which I can do many things, finding sounds hidden behind other sounds. I have always been fascinated by some instruments which cannot be immediately recognized. On this subject, I published several Benjamin records using the Glassharmonica , an Franklin instrument invented by in 1761, and Diapasons. Some of these instruments are quite big and they reach very low frequencies, up to 40 Hz. I also used signal bells used in underground excavations: they are partly electric, partly acoustic.

Christina Kubisch: Sure, there are sounds I exactly know where to find, in places like banks, or close to light signs. Lights actually emit curious sounds, just like LCD or plasma TVs. Internet or Bluetooth antennas emit very strong and annoying sounds, but they are part of our life. It is always nice to find something new, very strange sounds, but their source remains unknown. In some Countries, especially in North Europe and the USA , it is mandatory for stations to have induction systems for hearingimpaired people, so every kind of announcement can be broadcasted .

These systems often are in places where they shouldn’t be. For example, it happened that while I was walking around a street, I could hear everything that was going on inside an office, including voices and computer activities. I have a collection of hundreds of hours of recordings in my archive: I don’t know if this is music or noise, but I’m always fascinated by this aural universe halfway between heavy metal and pop music!

Furthermore, I like to work on spatial, four-channel diffusion systems, where I can obtain remarkable results.

Nowadays, we think we have any sound at our disposal on the Internet: my students for example rarely record anything, they look for sound files directly online. They do not realize that the offer is limited, pre determined. This is why I always use field recording in my compositions, so I can show a world still existing today; working with field recordings has become more intense lately.

Matto Milani: What are your analogue and digital work instruments?

30

headphones by building an instrument I can carry in my backpack so that I can listen to high-tension lines in the countryside, some kind of electromagnetic Land Art. By using very strong and heavy coils, I could pick up many magnetic fields, thus breaking the limits of the present receivers .

Matteo Milani: What are your considerations on the present situation of Sound Art?

Matteo Milani: Which cities surprised you the most on an electromagnetic level?

Christina Kubisch: What’s really new today is the desire to create art which not only sits on the wall, but which instead can be a deep personal experience. Sound Art, when it’s good, allows this experience through an individual listening, which arouses ideas and memories, different for each of us. Furthermore, Sound Art moves through time, and this makes it more difficult to use it as a collectible object, as it often happens today.

Christina Kubisch: In Oslo I found beautiful, strange things, that I couldn’t find anywhere else. This is the real pleasure of going around like in a safari, especially at night. It may sound like a joke, but the kind of sound I prefer is that of Perfumery lighting systems (for example in Via Dante, Milan ). Banks instead have a very high pitched, sinusoidal-like sound. Never heard such high and strident sounds! The map of Electrical Walks for me is like a score: until now I made 23 walks, and the next stops will be Copenaghen and Leeds . In 2010 I’ll be invited to map the Ruhr region, one of the biggest urban areas in Europe , which will also be the European city of culture in 2010. I’ll follow a walking route in several cities, but also by car, train and even bicycle.

http://www.christinakubisch.de/inde x_en.htm http://www.soundohm.com/christin a-kubisch-2/ http://www.dieschachtel.com/editio ns/ds3.htm

For this, I’m trying to enhance the

31

32

The Sound Ecosystems Of Agostino Di Scipio Marco Mancuso

Rooms”. This work was was represented by the new gallery Mario Mazzoli based in Berlini, one of the first galleries in the international dedicated to sound art.

An interview about “Stanze Private – Private Rooms” with Agostino di Scipo is an opportunity to talk intensively about the method, research and aesthetics of the art of sound. It is no easy task, given that he is one of the most well known contemporary electronic musicians, and most appreciated at the international level, instructor in the role of electronic music at the Conservatory of Naples, and Professor of live electronics at the Center Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) in Paris , Visiting faculty member at the Department of Communication and Fine Arts of Simon Fraser University (BurnabyVancouver, 1993) and visiting composer at the Sibelius Academy Computer Music Studio (Helsinki, 1995), artist in residence in 2004 of the DAAD Berlin Kuenstlerprogramm with

Those who know me and my interests can imagine my reaction when I was asked to write the catalog of the exhibition Digital Direct di Modena, curated by Caleffi Gilberto. One of the artists I was most interested in was Agostino di Scipio, and this is evident in any analysis of the texts chosen for the catalogue: where the interview, as a reflection on the content exposed to direct contact with the author, becomes a moment of openness and honesty between artist and critic.

The interview that follows is the full version of the interview done by Agostino di Scipio for Direct Digital, which was obviously not fully published in the catalog. Di Scipio, within the exhibition Modenese, used the hospital Sant’Agostino to make one of his most interesting and mature environmental installations,“Stanze Private – Private

a series of compositions that have been performed among others at the festival Inventionen in Berlin, the Festival Synthèse (Bourges), the ISCM (Lausanne) and the International

33

Computer Music Conference (Berlin, Thessaloniki, etc..) and author of writing that was published in the Journal of New Music Research, the Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), at the Contemporary Music Review, on Leonardo (MIT Press), and the Journal of Musicology Italian amongst others.

it responds through a complex language of sounds and vibrations to his physicality and behavior. uses sound as a medium and a means of emotional communication, as a real transfer of behavioral information. The objects used, the materials chosen, their placement in space, scenic construction, each draw the viewer inside the room where the work itself is set up, for his or her curiosity and voyueristic enjoyment, desire to look beyond the object and to “touch” it.

From curiosity to know what kind of sound can result from such common and well-known materials, the audience is drawn to try to understand the operation of the work.

“Stanze Private – Private Rooms” is a sound environment, which applies research into different ways to propigate sound in the environment and how these modes can interact and change according to the presence of people. “Private Rooms” is a work of sound art that requires and is nourished by the presence of man, as

“Stanze Private – Private Rooms”

34

this interactive element on emotional and environmental factors rather than use procedural interfaces?

Agostino di Scipio:The production of Stanze Provate – Private Rooms has been piecemeal, because in the two years since the request to delivery I have brought forward other projects.

Sometimes working on several projects at a time is useful, experimenting different ways of dealing with the same basic ideas, allowing technical solutions in different operating conditions. Usually I start from a sketch of the technical infrastructure, on the basis of which the work can generate sound independently, but in close relationship with the surrounding space. For “Private Rooms” I have outlined a network of miniature microphones and headsets (ie, miniature speakers) that, by accumulating background noise from the room environment, could possibly generate sound. Then I spent a long time to implement, empirically, the mutual influence between the various network components, making it to some extent self-regulate over time, and to dynamically change its own process depending on acoustic events in the surrounding space.

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“Stanze Private” works on multiple levels which are amalgamated into a single emotional and aesthetic by its author that intelligible and impeccable: the sound as a material in space, the sound as an element of experimentation and composition, sound as a medium of investigation, the interactive relationship between man and works of art, the sound as an element in the feedback that keeps the memory of a place and those who lived. And sound was certainly the cornerstone upon which rotated throughout the interview and chat with Agostino di Scipio.

Marco Mancuso: In your work Stanze provate – Private Rooms, there is a direct correspondence between the work and the environment in which it is posted. The ecosystem you’ve created is nourished by a mute exchange of energy between the sonic environment, the people who inhabit it, and the technological component of the work. Did you base

I am referring to each component, in the network, capable of produing, conveying, mediating, transferrring sound, depending on acoustic 35

circumstances and the materials present in the room, plus the digital sound processing, and, in short, the whole electroacoustic chain that. For me it is crucial to compose the interactions among these nodes, i.e. to shape up the range of their mutual relations, and the relations between individual nodes and the entire system (as well as the range of feedback from the whole to the single node) – that’s much more crucial for me than establishing what it sounds like and what the visual structur should be. The latter emerge later in the work, in a way consistent with the real time intarctions (almost all my recent works are like living creatures in circumstances of real time and real place, and rarely present prerecorded sounds). As you can imagine, the sonic potential and also the conceptual profile of the work came out a little at a time, with a prolonged trial, not on the basis of a predetermined expression.

self-organizing dynamics over time.

That’s a peculiar notion in all the Audible Ecosystems I’ve realised in recent years.

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Marco Mancuso: With “Stanze Private – Private Rooms” it seems that you want to assign to the spectator a voyeuristic role, in the sense you seem to propose to the viewer the task of taking a conscious role, not passive, but rather proactive, as someone who practices enjoyment, desire and consumption of the work.

Is sound is for you an ideal medium for this type of analysis?

I’d say that the expressive aspects of works like “Stanze Provate – Private Rooms” are slowly determined during my time of “living with” the work, through the months, they are not put forth at the outset as a finality, as abstract ideas. The interactive element your question refers to is, in my work, the unraveling of real-time relationships between the component parts of a whole. Emotional aspects and sound shapes emerge from this

Agostino di Scipio: Well, it touches an important point, and is also difficult in some respects. I would say rather that the work of “Stanze Private – Private Rooms” reveals a voyeuristic element that is just a way of perceiving, and to enjoy the art, which is appears crushed on the aesthetic dimension, blind and desperate: a work like “Private Rooms” says the observer is a “voyeur” when required, as nearly 36

always, to observe without being observed, and observed without affecting the observed. This theme, on the contrary, as the observer cannot, with his watch, not affect the observed (who want to or not), and the observed is not entirely alien to him.

position as immanent in all my work that I did not realize was never proclaimed, in either slogans or posters). In a sense that is provocative, the sound is experienced as interface and mediator (The title is deliberately ambiguous, “Sound is the interface”, I wrote a few years ago about this in the margin of the series of works entitled “Ecosystems audible”). The acoustic dimension is pervasive and the anthropological condition is ongoing, you cannot pause: our ears incessantly and always choose what to focus attention on the flow surrounding sound, and are always active in the area (before the ear hears the sound event, then the eye turns to look at the source). Of course, the ear is never detached from the world, is not isolated, but interacts with the environment constantly, and is always in action in building the consistency and the plurality of acoustic stimuli.

There are echoes here of “radical constructivism” thought, transverse to countless scientific disciplines and traditions of knowledge (I think of von Foersters work on cyber, and neurobiologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana). For me it is simply a way to declare the responsibility, knowingly or not, that each of us has in any relationship with others and with the surrounding environment. Facilities such as “Private Rooms” and the others that I have achieved in recent years, say that nothing is disconnected from the rest, that everything is connected to everything (a “green” for which it knowing some reflection of Edgar Morin). We cannot pretend to be opposite to the work, without altering its presence, or the alien presence of the subject.

“Stanze Private – Private Rooms” amplifies the noise inside these small rooms, these few jugs and glass ampoules, transparent. And it amplifies the noise in the surrounding environment, in the largest room where the installation is placed. It produces sound from the audience.

We as listeners can not only be part of this small ecosystem, our physical presence alters the acoustics of the surrounding space, altering the dynamic. Listening thus interferes on

With “Stanze Private – Private Rooms”, basically it is this kind of dualism, just across the art crushed in the aesthetic dimension, which puts it into question, making it uncertain. Yes, sound is an ideal medium for this type of research (which reflects the policy 37

listening, the listening is never something objective, is always something that changes the listening itself.“Stanze Private – Private Rooms” invites the voyeur listener (as would also the transparent glass, to curiously peek inside these small rooms, and to listen to voices of the feeble and not very clear, as from a neighbouring room in an apartment near) so that the listener does not feel the impossibility of its posting, the fiction of his alleged separateness in relation to the context of the work. The listener-observer voyeur remain as long as they are not warned about the responsibility alone for the simple fact of his own existence, so long as no warning to contribute to this already just with his mere presence. The function of the aesthetic becomes a prerequisite of social behaviour, beyond the aesthetic enjoyment.

Given the condition of relationship with the work, given that we act in any other and objects around, let it decide whether to act with awareness of the consequences of our actions, or remain in indecision, indifferent to the consequences of our actions.

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Marco Mancuso: In all your work, including Private Rooms, you do not only take care of the audio technology but also to the material and aesthetics of the instrument itself. Is the integration of sound, technology and material the point of your installations?

Agostino di Scipio:Yes, I guess so. In my work I tend to focus rather on technical and conceptual aspects, than on the final sound, since at the end of the day I know I can trust my ear, I need not to think too much about it. My approach on sound is perhaps due to some predisposition about the body and the ear, often for me more important than the eye, and it clearly stems from personal history of auditory and musical education.

There are interesting phenomena, in this respect: working on “Private Room”, sounds developed which are rather feeble, but also pungent, abrasive, and biting, sounding very much like glass, like actions with glass objects. That’s something not initially imagined, it came late in the project, yet not becoming more important that other aspects and gestures. In general, the consistency of that material element stems from the design, structure and dynamics of self-organized relationships and interactions mentioned earlier.

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Basically with apprpriate techniques, we provoke the irrational, the infinity of matter, and that in turn allow us to return to the finiteness of the human dimension

computer process is rendered spacedependent, adaptive.

I’ve been developing these techniques for over fifteen years now. Over time I have simplified the approach, and at the same time made it more effective in the algorithmic procedure. Of course, one can not separate the sound of the room, the reflections of the space given, from the sound produced by the equipment itself in the room: space and technical infrastructure are “structurally coupled”, to use a term from cybernetics and other systemic sciences, ecology included. In that sense, sound becomes and “interface” between us and the space: sound is energy (mechanical, acoustic, electroacoustics), but it also bears an “informational” signature of spaces and bodies from which they emanate.

A part of my research, in technological terms, consists in treating sound, in all its richness and complexity, as a carrier of information, leaving the idea behind that sound is separate from noise and that noise is a “lack of information”. From my background in experimental music I always obtained that the “sound” is “form”, not just and object or available energy, but as a pattern of traces left by human actions and tensions (in fact: “print”, or “timbre”). In installation works, this is also quite relevant, I think. However – perhaps building on pioneering work by earlier sound artists – I also try to

Marco Mancuso: The “space” is of fundamental importance for you: how to use sound to make a fluid environment, using different forms of perception by the public as an architectural form which relates source to its recipient?

Agostino di Scipio: I usually use electroacoustic transducers (microphones of various types, sometimes accelerometers or other) to detect the acoustic reflections of the walls or other niches resonant in a given space. Often I detect sounds reflecting the social function of the surrounding space, but small sounds that are typically removed from our auditory experience – acoustic scraps, sonic garbage. These sounds are analyzed by a computer, with digital signal processing methods, so the computer measures some features of sound, and that information is finally used to drive the process of generation and transformation of the environmental sound itself. At the base, there is a kind of retroactive scheme in which the sound production is at least partially modified by the manner in which the space responds to the very same sounds that are produced: the 39

broaden the understanding of “form” to what we might call “active acoustic horizon” – ie the profile defined in the real space by the real time sonic process. You may call it an antivirtualist position, maybe antiillusionist. That admittedly contrasts with more trendy directions, nowadays. But that is good! I guess I am purseing a kind of heretical, and anyway autonomous, approach on technology.

sounds?

Agostino di Scipio: I cannot recognize any purity in my work, if only for biographical reasons (on which I won’t touch here). Since long (I guess since Anton Webern, at least, beginning of 20th century), nobody can claim any kind of purity… Thank goodness!

“High” and “low”, “serious” and “pop”, communicate, hybridize, overlap. At the same time, we can feel how liberating is any artwork vis a vis the technocratic ideology suffocating our lives, and hegemonic in the music and sound art worlds too. The variety of current developments is definitely interesting, and I tend to be omnivorous – but even then I tend to listen very very carefully … I mean, listen to sound to perceive the degree of freedom that the artist is able to carve out in doing his or her work. The sound always bear traces of the skill and autonomy with which an artist strives to operate. There are audible signs of how free he or she can be in his or her existence. It’s not a question of trendy currents, fashion, labels, movements. It’s a widespread problem, that you see both in ‘academic’ productions and research, and in productions claiming a more direct and emotional communicability. In the end, today both those lines, however different, are often very self-referential: the one is a stranger to the problem of communication because it feels that

.

Marco Mancuso: Your experience with electronic technologies and digital noise is vast and multifaceted. We recognize those who complain about the ‘purity’ of their discipline before the onset of practical applications and the accessibility of home computer music, or are you more inclined to deal with the potential of integration?

What in your opinion are the reasons for the contemporary complaint that digital music lacks communicability and feeling, as distinct from the tradition of concrete and electronic

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as insoluble, the latter trivialises communication at any rate, flattening it out on the media marketing goals.

As always, the really interesting things happen elsewhere, on the edge, where the conditions of existence are uncertain, unstable. Crucial is not what kind of artistic language or

context one deals with, which what margin of manouver, what spaces of free action and participation is structurally consistent to his or her work.

http://xoomer.virgilio.it/adiscipi/

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From Cfu To Funen: Interview With Jakob Jakobsen Loretta Borrelli

relationships stand out among single entities, in the awareness of having to be present in one’s own social context, one’s own training and one’s own time.

This practice has involved the Art Academy , in particular in Milan .

Artistic training in the past few years has been turned upside down mostly due to the Bologna case in ’99. The Academies were swept over by the idea of reform at zero cost. The curricula were transformed with the view to allow a more comfortable insertion into the workplace by making way for the system of study credits. The school taxes were increased exceedingly, weighing down on students, who are increasingly poor and ready to become the knowledgeable precarious workers of tomorrow. The connections with the economic production systems are narrower and more evident but the threat for the students of the loss of freedom is obscured by a false concrete possibility of working.

Last year you could have been walking in an Italian city piazza and suddenly find yourself among many people who were attending a University lecture. These actions were organised in order to take Universities and Academies out of their closed and consolidated norm.

Self-learning in Italy has taken on the form of a network, Uniriot, composed of students determined to create autonomous learning zones where they have time to re-elaborate their own training and intentions. It’s not just a proposal for the sharing of knowledge, as alternative to the institutionalised learning process, but also an opportunity to make

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Jakob Jakobsen: In Denmark we find a counter-revolutionary situation.

Many efforts that lean toward the production of a non-capitalist way of thinking are under great pressure and in many cases are under direct assault. The attack on Christiania and Youth House are good examples of how alternative social structures are perceived, how they are considered as threats and this makes us understand at what depth the authorities are trying to exclude and eliminate modalities of alternative living and anti-capitalist ideas. But I don’t think there is anything different in the Danish situation, we find ourselves faced with the same brutal capitalist campaign that people face all over the world. The processes of valorisation are everywhere.

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In April of this year a group of students from the Funen Art Academy , an independent academy in Copenhagen , did a tour of Italy with the objective of coming into contact with certain activist and underground Italian groups. Among the teachers who accompanied them was Jakob Jakobsen, a Danish artivist, who for some time has been involved and has elaborated practices for the liberation of artistic knowledge. In 2001, together with the artist Henrietta Heise, he founded the Copenhagen Free University, establishing it in his own apartment. This experience lasted 6 years and is what they themselves describe as being “selfteaching”. In this interview Jakob tells us about his present and past experiences as an activist and teacher.

Loretta Borrelli: It seems that the objective of your production is that of liberating yourself from the capitalist production, do you think this is possible?

Jakob Jakobsen: Well, I don’t think that it’s possible to be free of capitalist production in this social order. We are all subject to the capitalist valorisation. The capital is living its ruthless life. But I interpret it as a prospective for my activity, to imagine a society without capitalist accumulation and without money as a determining factor in the relationship between people. I think my personal

Loretta Borrelli: What is your experience as an artist and activist in Denmark ? What is the difference between the Danish and international panorama?

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activity as a visual artist is to produce anti-capitalist ways of thinking, in a certain sense in line with the nonfascist life of Foucault.

especially in terms of autonomy of work. Work today is the principle control and valorisation machine that regulates our bodies. In particular, with cognitive capitalism, work is becoming an integrated network in our lives. To be able to survive outside of work is potential. But we must remember that precariousness in general is not a choice but is imposed on a lot of people. In any case I see a potential in developing new forms of autonomous life outside of work based on a minimal economy and the sharing of resources. This is what I intend as a positive side of precariousness.

Loretta Borrelli: Hai scritto: You wrote: “Precariousness has two faces: one is connected to insecurity and suffering and the other constitutes potential�. I also think that there is potential. What is the way to enhance this potential?

Do you think art can create a new way of thinking and new social relationships?

Jakob Jakobsen: The potential that I refer to is the value of autonomy –

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a “taking power”, without accepting the usual hierarchy between the norm and the alternative. With selfteaching we were challenging, we were “detouring” the norm, and the hierarchies were completely overthrown. We weren’t interested in working as an alternative institution, we wanted to take power. Alright! “All power to the Copenhagen Free University”.

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Loretta Borrelli: In May 2001 you founded the Copenhagen Free University with Henrietta Heise, establishing it in your apartment. ABZ describes yours as a social activity, beginning with a unique statement: “We’re opening a University”. Then, at the end of 2007, you closed CFU. What value do you give to the experience of “Self-training”?

If we think back now, the CFU was like a dream. In actual fact we were able to take power and found an institution capable of valuing non-conformist knowledge. We were principally interested in researching the construction of knowledge and the processes of valorisation, which with the development of the economy and knowledge and cognitive capitalism became increasingly normative. We tried to understand other forms of knowledge more deeply knowledge that is created in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in daily life and we used it in CFU as an instrument to maintain knowledge itself alive and fluid, by contrasting economical instrumentation that was growing in schools, in Universities and in research institutions. We insisted on knowledge as a relationship between people, like a social rapport, and so we were very critical about economical instrumentation processes. We worked on a series of research projects intent on valuing

Jakob Jakobsen: rI believe that the different experiences of self-teaching must be seen in the historical and social context where they were developed. In our case, when we founded the Copenhagen Free University we found ourselves in a context of an expanding economy before 9/11. It was a situation where capitalism was not yet militarised, which is what happened after 9/11 with the war against terrorism. Selfteaching, therefore, was based on a certain level of trust in the possibilities of autonomous self-management against the capital. It was in some way

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hidden or repressed knowledge. In six years of life of the CFU we developed 5 research fields: art and economy, feminist organisation, television activism, evasion and history production.

State and the municipal administration, but with this administrative council of its own. It’s a small school, it only has 60 students.

There’s a certain open-mind toward experimentation in the artistic education field, but it isn’t a selfteaching; you can say that you work on the edge of an official system of artistic training.

The war against terrorism, in the end, was a war against autonomy on all levels and in all shapes and sizes. As the repressive politics increased and passed onto the offensive side, the conceded spaces for self- teaching were scarcer, and soon they bean to disappear altogether. The political spaces of autonomy were pushed to the defensive side, and it became increasingly difficult to maintain the political potential of self- teaching.

At the moment we are working on the studio independently from the model created from the Bologna case, and we are composing a study plan of 5 years outside the European system of credits. As for the work method, our programs work collectively and are oriented toward students. But the school and the students are unstable, after our decision to work outside the system elaborated by Bologna . The marginalisation of the schools and of the students that are outside the credit system is destined to grow, seeing as the system will be implemented to practically every school in Europe . To contrast this tendency we’re working on a construction of a network of independent art schools all over the world.

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Loretta Borrelli: What can you tell me about your current experience of teaching at the Funen Art Academy?

Loretta Borrelli: I realise that it is an enormous issue, but I’m interested in knowing what you think about the experience of teaching intended as a form of activism

Jakob Jakobsen: At the end of CFU, it was interesting for me to work at the Funen Art Academy . Funen is an independent school financed by the 46

Jakob Jakobsen: I must make a distinction between CFU and the Funen Art Academy. In the first we work principally on the research and the production of knowledge. The issue of distribution of knowledge was not based on a pedagogical method, but rather on the sharing of knowledge itself. At the Funen Art Academy the experience is hybrid. As much as I work collectively, in the subjects I face, I always do politics.

The students of the Academy, on the other hand, generally are not politically active, but what I try to provoke is an awareness of political implications of artistic activity. Some students have a good political awareness, and I, especially in the relationship with this group, try to work outside the school, creating a rapport with the urban and social contexts of the city where the school is located.

experiences, but in institutional environments. Do you think it’s possible to continue self-training in such contexts? Or must an experience of self- teaching be created at the same time? Do you think that selftraining and self-teaching are the right way to escape the productive logic on the context of the economy of knowledge?

Jakob Jakobsen: I believe that selftraining is always necessary, because institutions are never capable of giving sufficient or adequate knowledge. Even the “progressive” institutions act according to the norm, and so the only way out, for the schools, is to decentralise as much as possible. I think that the “good” institutional contexts should encourage and facilitate self-training between students not like a medium for saving money, but as a medium to keep the institution alive. A part of the budget should be given to the students, so that they may manage the planning of courses, workshops and meetings. To ask students to assume the responsibility is perhaps burdensome, but in this way they develop their capabilities of selfmanagement and sharing knowledge.

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Loretta Borrelli: In the past few years in Italy , there have been self-training

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http://www.funenartacademy.com/

http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversit y.dk

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A_ctivism Otherehto

The idea that lies at the basis of this hypothesis is that every labelling of the processes of resistance using the term ‘art» transforms such practice, regardless of the degree of subversiveness, into an ineffectual passage à l’acte . This already occurs with the mere use of the artistic rhetoric that weakens a priori activism, because it tends to turn it into a mere representation and dramatization of the true form of the political struggle. How can – one may object – such a linguistic detail affect the outcome of this kind of activity?

In this article I would like to introduce some of my thoughts on the forms of protest in art. My statements were conceived on occasion of the round table “Out of the fiction of protest Art and political activism” that took place on 24 May 2009 in Milan. In order to synthesize my thoughts I have decided to divide the article into three hypothesis aiming at eliciting the development of topics that either deny or confirm a given stance.

Hypothesis 1: Within the sphere of art expressing ACTIVISM is linguistically impossible, because such practice [any political form of art] is immediately renamed ARTIVISM. The renaming determines the image though which performances reach the public, which affects their power, the potential of impact of the ‘poweraction».

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In order to grasp the importance of the nominal identification, one has to dwell upon the language. A language is a tool that alienates us from our direct experience of ‘being-in-te-world». By adding a layer of

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abstract or interpretational reality, we can attribute a meaning though which we relate to bodies and things. We may say that the name takes up the same function as the shape both merge into the wrapper though which we come into touch with what surrounds us.

divide the wide-reaching field of art that is nowadays identified as artivistic, into two categories: art that makes use of politics solely as a source of inspiration [thematic artivism] and art that makes politics through the use and the propaganda of the new production methods [methodological a_tivism]. Within the former I include all those works of art, where the issue of resistance is present solely in terms of concept.

These artists create works that aim to denounce some socio-political issues, but their critical approach does not affect the inner structure of their work.

The potential offered by the noun [the linguistic body] and by shape [the representation, the medium being used] are filtered by the relational networks of a given society. The process of identification of a body or of an object occurs at the points of collision between the generic virtual potential within the name and shape and the specific social relationships though which people relate to these bodies or objects. The so developed set of meanings becomes engulfed in the materiality of the body or thing, thus altering both its inner structure and dynamics of action. By ‘dynamics of action» I mean to the impact power that a body or object can bring about within a specific society.

To be more specific, I find it preposterous that many artists, whose work aims to denounce the system (for instance those who denounce the exploitation of workforce, neocolonialism, gentrification ) keep sharing and applying the archaic model of intellectual propriety. In so doing they show that they are not keeping into consideration, consciously or not, that the way a message is delivered [the potentialities offered by name and shape] defines the message itself [structure + dynamics of action].

Hypothesis 2: Artivism comes in

handy for the art system [above all for the figures of power within and around it] because it is often used as evidence and warranty for the ethical-social commitment of those who create, curate and use contemporary art.

I am thinking about the concept of ‘uniqueness» that we find in several artistic “protest” projects, that, through an improper choice of the medium or of the distribution policies,

I personally think that we should

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limit the use and reproducibility of the work. The decision to apply the restrictive rules of Copyright also when the format of the work (video, books and digital prints) implies in itself the possibility to share, copy, modify and hacker it freely, reveals their real degree of activism.

Especially because I think that the goal of any activistic project should be that of making alternative information accessible to an ever-growing number of people. Such a decision, on the contrary, prevents mass use.

that keeps the criterion of authenticity obviously acquires greater value in the market of art, which is constantly searching for new ethical and social diadems.

We shall call this phenomenon ‘strategic embellishment» because, although it seemingly reproduces the socio-political commitment, it remains at the core merely a functional tool that attracts some candid light upon it, that makes us all feel [those produces, curates and uses these products] inwardly honest and democratic.

We tend to forget that society can easily do without the official, political art [art that is "acknowledged", the art of galleries and biennial exhibitions, that mainly includes examples of thematic artivism], whereas the figures of power find that much more difficult.

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Art and above all protest art is functional for the system of power [post-fordist capitalism] to communicate the possibilities of expression for an opposition within the system. Through the promotion of political art [the art that denounces social issues] the system can proclaim itself democratic and “politically correct”. In so doing, the opponents can freely “express” [vent] their tension against the system, so that such tension does not directly collide

This obviously also affects the efficacy of the project because it restricts its free circulation, thus weakening its power. Therefore it appears obvious to end up thinking that in such situations the discourse on resistance does not go much further than a mere rhetoric or moralization. On the other hand such approach is favourable for the artist because it allows him to make use of all the concessions offered by the system of art: a work

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with the issues that they denounce.

books of alternative information on (bio)technologies. This is just a little example of a kind of activism that has joined the philosophy , which overcomes the boundaries to open up new “material and immaterial” passageways.

On the contrary, in the framework of methodological a_ctivism, what is created [the message] matters less than how it is created the conditions around the creation of the work: the medium being used, the modalities for the creation, the use and distribution of the project. An example of such practice are the projects by CAE Critical Art Ensemble who offer on their website ( http://www.critical-art.net/books/in dex.html ) the chance to download their “works” for free, that is their

The ingeniousness of FLOSS political project lies in the creation of distributional criteria as an alternative to the present systems that emphasize content over form; an approach that aims at overcoming the policy of terror characterizing the present prescriptive concepts.

FLOSS, Free/Libre/Open Source Software

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into a certain something that makes things , performs actions. I personally think that keeping at a distance from the field of art can offer the certain something two kinds of approaches: one based on the academic research, the other on the out-and-out politics of activism. In the framework of the academic research I would suggest the use of artistic creativity to extend the model of scientific rationality.

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Hypothesis 3: if a person is not interested in ‘making art» or in ‘being an artist», but in using art, or rather, in the alternative creative processes and

The symbolic self-castration may result in a possible strategy against the weakening of the critical approach of such works. Moreover it would hinder the swallowing up by the market of art and their resulting trivialization. It would allow to overcome the limits of the rhetoric [presentation and interpretation techniques and models] and artistic grammar [all the conventions and notions that are currently applied to art]. Such approach would facilitate and consolidate the discussion not merely around the specific details of the system, but on the way the entire system as such works, by which I don’t mean the art system in particular, but the organization of the system of power in general.

tools, and to other purposes, he/she should not be called artist, and his/her work should not be regarded as art, because that would merely weaken the active and sociofunctional character of such activities and works.

Considering that artivism and the socalled political art are frequently exploited for a ‘strategic embellishment», maybe it would be worthwhile to conceive other approaches. This is why I would like to put forward the idea of ‘symbolic selfcastration», which consists in transforming the figure “of the artist”

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50 Years After Baron Snow’s Two Cultures Gigi Ghezzi

Financial Times, Telegraph stressed the driving force behind Snow’s formula, that while it was just too dichotomouson the one hand, it has created a number of important pedagogical and epistemological debates between the ways of Stefan Collini producing science and art on the other hand.

May 7, 1959, we are at the University of Cambridge, at the annual Sir Robert Rede’s Lecturer . A British physicist and author holds a conference entitled “The Two Cultures” in which he attributes many political, environmental and cultural worldly problems of our time to the break of communication that took place between science and the humanities.

, professor of literature and history of ideas at the University of Cambridge, and editor of a publication that collects all the author’s speeches, explained in an article in The New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/articl e/mg20227066.700-science-and-rt-still-two-cultues-divided.html?full=true, that Snow’s real enemy were not only the humanist intellectuals, but the hyperspecialization of scientific language that, although it was inevitable according to Snow, it shouldn’t have been to the detriment of a certain bilingualism (as the scientists’ ability to transfer knowledge to society, and scholars’ capability to mind and write about scientific issues.

The speaker’s name is Charles Percy Snow, namely Baron Snow, and his as simple as controversial famous definition of “two cultures” will become a topos of the cultural and epistemological debates in the second half of the twentieth century.

Fifty years have passed since that speech and the anniversary did not slip the British journals: New Scientist,

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The journal Nature has taken this passage to vindicate the relevance of one of the stimuli that Snow wanted to convey in science: on the one hand defend science against attacks debasing human sciences, on the other hand accept the dialectical approach, awareness, the depth of history and of the results representation, which are peculiar to art and literature.

Photo: HULTON-DEUTSCH/CORBIS .

And this is the perspective of the “Third Culture”, the bridge between the two cultures advocated by Snow in his reading of 1963, entitled “The Two Cultures: A Second Look.”

According to the author, between scientists and humanists, a new highly communicative culture emerged, a culture of writers who could deal with scientific issues.

Charles Percy Snow wanted to promote science against an isolationist trend that has marked the intellectuals. Such a vaguely used social class, but about which the journal Nature for the editorial “Doing good, 50 years on” (n.459 , 10 of 07/05/09) pointed that people have to understand the intentions that motivated the intervention of “two cultures” and subsequently Snow’s speeches. One of these intentions was for sure the possibility to cope with the problem of poverty and get to the point of it. And this came especially from cultured people as should be the protagonists of the “two cultures”. In his 1964 essay, “With good fortune,” Snow wrote in fact “we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of … the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once they are seen, can not be denied. “

And on the third culture many journalists today, especially the science ones, enjoy discounting Snow’s views on the new practice in blogging, photography and film art applied to scientific issues, or in projects coordinated by some institutions, as it has been discussed in a previous article on Digimag ( http://www.digicult.it/digimag/articl e.asp?id=393), and let alone private initiatives as that of the editor and entrepreneur John Brockman, who with his essay “The Third Culture” in 1991 launched the website Edge, 55

where he still tries to convey the intellectual energies of science and art to common empirical studies.

and ambiguous observations, have focused a central paradigm in the philosophy of science: man (re)constructs his world according to anthropological constants. The products of science belong to them, as well as images, metaphors and languages which may vary over time and vary man’s conception itself.

That’s why they must be subject to ethical judgments and ideal goals, such as the aid to countries with a lower life expectancy, which is a term that Snow himself often uses as a scientific benchmark .

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Baron Snow’s generally provocative

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Science Is Sexy: Felice Frankel Silvia Casini

Inside the science lab, thanks to the collaboration with other scientists, Felice Frankel translates into images objects and scientific concepts she then brings outside, making of herself the ideal mean through which scientists who want to communicate through images can connect to the public.

“I’m not an artist”. “I put science into pictures”. This is how Felice Frankel begins: scientific photographer at the MIT, last 20 th of May she presented and discussed her work in the lecture “Speaking of science through images: scientific photography”, organized by

She appeared many times on the covers of prestigious magazines as Nature, Science, Scientific American and the New York Times, her images are created in order to better communicate the concepts of science, thus making a scientific story more effective, with the conviction that the visual part of a story is as important as the written one. Her images are visualizations, like is suggested by her work-group – Envisioning Science Group – a kind of “collective” based at the Harvard University, which puts together scientists, graphic designers, writers, all united to explore the best ways to visualize scientific concepts.

the University of Trento for the program “Writing and talking of science”.

Author of many publications, i.e.

“Envisioning Science, On the Surface of Things e Images of the Extraordinary in Science” con George M. Whitesides, Felice Frankel has followed many paths during her professional career: she first started as a biologist and lab technician, then she went on to landscape architectural photographer she then

The process that takes to the realization of an image, is for Felice Frankel a collaboration, and not only

won a scholarship as “artist-i-residence”, until her present profession of scientific photographer.

the work of a single person. This collective activity is important 57

especially because, the artist herself says, the amount of information and date present in a concept or a scientific object is so big that only through teamwork, the procedure to visualization can be (almost) lossless .

The scientist, the technical, the graphic, the photographer are therefore needed, so that they can check not only on the reliability of the process taking to the creation of the image – Felice Frankel avoids digital retouches as much as possible – but also on the final result, that has to be to communicate scientific content.

che va controllata e, se necessario, combattuta. Vedere e leggere sembrano essere due pratiche strettamente legate l’una all’altra, necessarie per poter comprendere le sue immagini.

This leaf is hydrophobic–it repels water. A drop of water beads up on the leaf because the water molecules are attracted to each other at the nanoscale. The attraction between molecules creates a thin skin at the drop’s surface.

Per questo motivo, la fotografa chiede che ognuna delle sue immagini sia accompagnata da un testo scritto, una didascalia che spieghi di che cosa l’immagine è illustrazione, il tipo di tecniche e sostanze utilizzate nonchè la loro interazione. Per esempio, l’immagine che ha avviato la carriera della Frankel come fotografa scientifica, apparsa sulla copertina di Science ( http://www.imageandmeaning.org/g allery/image3.htm), è accompagnata da parole che la descrivono in questo modo: gocce d’acqua colorate interagiscono con una struttura di materiali idrorepellenti su superficie piatta. Nella conferenza, Felice Frankel spiega di aver utilizzato una combinazione di luce ultravioletta e al tungsteno insieme a colori fluorescenti per realizzare lo scatto.

Ciascuno può leggere un’immagine a seconda del proprio bagaglio conoscitivo e culturale, spiega l’artista e, in qualche modo, sembra voler dire che è proprio la proliferazione di letture diverse (e di sguardi alternativi)

“Queste immagini non sono artistiche proprio perché viene esplicitata la procedura, e non vi è una componente emotiva o di ricerca su di sé”, sostiene Felice Frankel. Ma è proprio vero che la scacchiera lucida formata da un alternarsi di verde e viola in rilievo non ha nulla a che fare

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con l’arte? Così sembrerebbe ascoltando la Frankel che, con ironia, racconta di quando a New York contattava innumerevoli gallerie d’arte potenzialmente interessate ad esporre le sue fotografie: dopo una serie di rifiuti (le immagini non erano abbastanza artistiche nemmeno per i galleristi), decise di essere una fotografa scientifica, guadagnando piano piano le copertine delle più importanti riviste scientifiche.

post-it come precisa la Frankel) posizionato sotto la superficie di vetro. Una serie di sette piccoli magneti circolari sotto la carta gialla capaci di interagire con la goccia di ferrofluido fino a modificarne quindi la forma. La goccia non è riconoscibile in questa immagine, né è riconoscibile il post-it giallo. L’armonia del verde, delle sfumature di arancio e giallo, del nero, creano un gioco di superfici lucide e riflettenti, forme tridimensionali che non sembrano rappresentare nulla se non l’interazione tra materiali, consistenze e colori diversi.

Una goccia di ferrofluido del diametro di tre centimetri versata su una lastra di vetro. Un foglio di carta giallo (un

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Frankel’s images are anything but transparent: they are visible, show themselves on the covers of scientific magazines, far from being a vehicle to more efficiently communicate a scientific content. They are free images, open to the misunderstanding of non-scientists.

Even before we understand what reality these images represent, the viewer dwells on the contrast of vivid colors, blue and green, on the liquidity of the colors which not only fill a surface delimited by an outline, but become themselves protagonist shapes.

A 3-cm drop of ferrofluid on a glass slide. A slip of yellow paper sits below the slide and a set of seven small circular magnets under the paper affects the form of the drop .

It is true, as the American photographer says, that “the process of creating a representation of something clears your mind”, but it is also undeniable that in both the scientific and artistic world, visual representations of undefined phenomena and objects (for example bio-medics images relative to cognitive functions, or images related to quantum mechanics) are almost non-representable. They are images, as theorized by arts historian James Elkins , that represent the limits of representation, more that representing an object. It seems reductive therefore to speak of simple communication when we refer to scientific visualization, also because they use and feed on a number of techniques and notions pertaining to a vocabulary of critics and of artists practices.

Felice Frankel‘s images promise to seduce the observer, become haptic , request to be grazed, caressed, not only seen. The background noise of these images – which Frankel wants to eliminate to make them univocally interpretable – is back when the caption disappears and the spectator is left alone, watching. They are feminine images (not only because they were created by a woman), and maybe also in this resides the secret of their appeal.

The shadow of an object which doesn’t seem to belong to it. This is the latest challenge that Felice Frankel presents in her next book: to represent what cannot be represented, like quantum mechanics.

Here, as much as the images try to get close to a faithful, incontrovertible 60

representation, the use of metaphor will be needed more and more.

Undoubtedly, even if some of the most interesting images are today produced by scientists and not artists, scientists themselves do not seem to interpret images considering their background, a background that cannot be strictly scientific, but that goes inevitably towards arts, its codes and languages

The true challenge, not only for Frankel but for anyone who deals with arts as a curator or a critic, would be to emphasize the femininity of these images – and of the science they witness – while respecting their function of mediation, communication and scientific contents transmission, but at the same time freeing these images from Frankel the caption that Felice goes with them, from the written word, from any attempt to close them in the definition of science, art or an hybrid between them, allowing them to be, simply, images.

Until the time when someone will be able to look at these pictures and not only read them, will continue to keep her secret, almost a promise of an internal revolution: that science is sexy! Perhaps those artists who set foot in science labs have already understood this?

These water drops are constrained by a grid of hydrophobic lines drawn on a flat surface. Because water molecules are attracted to each other at the nanoscale, the drops bead up and do not mix. Coloring the water before dropping it on the grid reinforced this important point.

http://web.mit.edu/felicef/

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The Aware And Creative Technology Of Goto10 Giulia Simi

best proposals to overthrow the capillary control system of late capitalism are those that come from the ultra-technical environment of programmers/artists. The visionary idea, which is also realistic, is the capacity to network in an autonomous and free way, taking advantage and amplifying the technologies available, which can be a central node for a new model of life based on sharing information and processes locally and globally.

Freedom, autonomy and the control of instruments and creation processes should be the basis for every project, be it artistic, political or social, which could be considered as being democratic.

The collective GOTO10 (the answers of this interview were elaborated with the name GOTO10 by Karsten Gebbert, Claude Heiland-Allen, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk and Thomas Vriet), active internationally for years in the technological activist environment, is a good example of how a group of programmer-artists manages to face and win against the swamps of our time through a creative, aware and thought-out use of technology. I interviewed them so that they could tell us about some aspects of their complex project.

But the concept of autonomy, which brings with it the thorny and inevitable aspect of responsibility, seems to increasingly move away from our intellectual production environments on all levels, which are often transformed in empty and “blackmail� communities deprived of passion and incapable of putting together or sharing visionary ideas and projects of cultural and social transformation.

It is by chance, or maybe not, that the

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of the collective in the form of performances, exhibitions and lectures.

In recent years the organisation has added two important projects, mainly to make the reflective side of GOTO10 stronger: the Digital Artists’ Handbook (in collaboration with UK based organisation folly) and the FLOSS+Art book, published by Mute publishing Ltd. The first is a practical guide to using open source software within a digital art practice, the second reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art.

It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.

The FLOSS+art book is written, designed and published using FLOSS only, has an open license and is freely available online. Both books contain articles written by numerous experts in the field.

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Giulia Simi: First of all, something about your history. How was GOTO10 project born?

GOTO10: GOTO10 was created in 2003

by Thomas Vriet and Aymeric Mansoux. It started as a two man organisation in Poitiers, France with the goal to boost local activities surrounding experimental electronic music and digital art. After organising several workshops and concerts locally, GOTO10 became more and more international and grew into a collective of 11 artists/musicians/programmers from all over Europe. The organisation started to define its goals more clearly

Giulia Simi: Your first purpose is to support FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) as independent

in 2005 and its main projects came into existence shortly after: A GNU/Linux distribution for artists, called pure:dyne, an IRC network linking like-minded organisations and hosting new networks and groups, make art festival, a workshop program to support artists in the use of FLOSS, and the artistic and reflective output

method to create tools for digital arts.

This practice involves programmers and artists working together for the autonomy of creative process. I think it’s a political and symbolical activity that would be very important, not only into the the new media art environment. Do you think that common people, like standard pc 63

users, would be ever able to control their technological tools? And if yes, do you think this could represent an important changement in social life?

friendliness in much needed areas).

The key aspect that makes the platform interesting for us and many others though, is its freedom and hack-ability. In that sense, from our perspective, its not really as important whether GNU/Linux now is on its way to become a big player in the desktop sector, but that we can use it to profoundly change our approach to how we collaborate and produce, understand ownership and property.

GOTO10: First of all, it is important to understand that in GOTO10 we do not have artists and programmers, but software artists. It is for us an important distinction that marks the shift from the “software as tool” to “the software as medium” paradigm.

In this sense, from our perspective there are 2 very important points that lead on from there: 1) FLOSS is not just alternative to proprietary tools but an entirely different way of thinking and using computers.

2) The key components of most activities associated with FLOSS are sharing information and learning.

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Giulia Simi: How much fundraising is important in your work and what are your strategies to carry on your projects out of mainstream contemporary art?

This by itself is an entirely different philosophy, one that emphasizes education and experimentation over a passive consumer attitude. You could say that this new mode indeed is already a significant change in a positive direction, one that has definitely wider implications than only for software-artists or programmers.

Generally it is of course a good development when the GNU/Linux desktop market share grows (and thus attracts more developers and interest in furthering functionality and user-

GOTO10: All of our projects start to exist as a passionate act of creation.

Most of these are not funded obviously. As such GOTO10 is a creative sandbox. If some of the experiments (let it be art, new workshops ideas, music, software projects, events, etc…) start to grow and become stable then we try to get 64

financial support for it, or simply show it around depending on the project’s nature.

based on capability to make network.

Particularly, you don’t have a physical meeting place so you communicate mainly via IRC and mailing lists, that are the first and oldest tools to make network in internet. But what do you think about web 2.0 and social networking platforms? Do you think it could be possible to use them in order to make creative experiments?

On the other hand, bigger projects need particular care once they’re out of the sandbox, for example the “make art” festival which takes place in Poitiers (France) couldn’t exist without public funding (mainly the territorial collectivities and the state) and also the help of different partner organisations local and international.

GOTO10: Web 2.0 is a bit vague, it does not mean much, but there’s no doubt that the advances in open technologies in recent years have enabled websites to do really clever things. Still, we are not so keen on using or promoting social networking platforms – the gated community model suffers from “vendor lock-in”, which is completely against the spirit of the free and open Internet. The technologies (for example RSS and Atom feeds) are there for a distributed and open alternative, whereby each individual controls their own content, but can still interact with other sites and build a wider community that isn’t controlled by some corporation with profit in mind.

Furthermore these platforms usually miss the point of human communication, focusing only on the transfer and sorting of information and playing on the ever growing ability of the online homo sapiens sapiens to contemplate himself in the mirror.

Generally, because funding free software and art is difficult we always try to be clever with money. As a consequence it is often that we “trojan” projects within projects. For example if one of us get an artist in residence somewhere, we will tend to use in-house GOTO10 software for the projects, so that this technology can be developed further, be documented, tested, etc.

In the end, we don’t have any particular strategy for our work except for keep on doing what we like to do and not force ourselves in compromises for the sake of visibility in such or such art scene. The most important thing is to go on inventing new kinds of projects and working with people with whom we share the same vision of the free and open source culture and arts.

Giulia Simi: Your activity is mostly

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Of course this does not prevent artistic experiment to be done in such environments, as long as they’re not just gratuitous demonstration of the use of a certain technology, but as network, we find them rather poor and limited compared to what the Internet has to offer and still allows to do today. As for network collaboration we indeed use rather “old” systems and protocols because they work perfectly fine and are not bloated, so why change? Of course this has nothing to do with a systematic refusal for more recent technologies or novelty innovation. Quite the opposite – we make an extensive use of distributed version control systems, virtual servers, and are always keen in transforming our work-flows, network environments and try/adopt new ways of sharing information.

near future projects: what are you working on in these months?

GOTO10: Amongst GOTO10′s latest projects was the launching of our netlabel FLOSS GOSUB10, presented in March 2009 during Wintercamp in Amsterdam, releasing innovative new mode +v noise music and audio-visuals created using . Within the framework of Linuxwochen Linz 2009, GOTO10 members developed , an IRC-based collaborative music platform and held a workshop around it. The next steps for GOTO10 are to further develop and professionalize their long term projects such as pure:dyne, art.deb/people.makeart and the digital artists’ handbook.

Following Summerlab in Gijon, there will be a week-long development session of pure:dyne hosted by the local center for arts, LABoral, where we will mainly be aiming at releasing a new major version of the platform.

Finally, make art 2009 will take place during the second week of December this year, so stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter for more info on upcoming gigs!.

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http://goto10.org/ Giulia Simi:Last question about your

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The Digital Market Of Elektra Donata Marletta

opening a window over the huge contemporary panorama that rotates around the art and digital culture’s world. The value of the IMDA resides in the ability of the organizing team, above all Alain Thibault and Ana Ascencio, of gathering the creative minds in an informal atmosphere, which not only allows the exchange of ideas and projects, but also creates the basis for the emergence of new collaborations and cultural exchange, also mada possible by the international nature of the event.

Last 6th and 7th of May Montreal’s Cinémathèque Québécoise has hosted for the third consecutive year the International Marketplace for Digital Arts (IMDA), event organized within Elektra, new media and audiovisual art festival. The International Marketplace for Digital Arts is a meeting for professional networking among those active in the field of production, creation and diffusion of digital arts.

Placed in the contemporary artistic scenario in which market rules often and sadly prevail to the detriment of socio-cultural aspects, the IMDA represents a unique occasion not only to stay updated on the latest news, thanks to the presentations and the promotional material offered to participants, but also the way to contribute to the development and diffusion of a collaborative and open culture, which can give birth to the emergence of a real community that may enhance the progress of digital culture that today is getting lost in the maze of a context more and more ruled by the market.

The first of the two days of the market, dedicated to the presentations of festivals, art galleries, labs and a range of organizations and cultural institutions that operate on a international level within the field of new media art, offered to its participants the occasion to attend to the presentations of various high profile socio-cultural projects,

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media art and new technologies, and the Society for Art and Technology (SAT), multidisciplinary centre devoted to research, creation, production and presentation of works linked to digital culture.

During the second and final day of the Market we had the chance to attend the presentations of artists and cultural entrepreneurs active in Canada; the variety and high quality of the local artistic projects confirms the growing interest and focus of producing and spreading digital art in Canada, both on a public and private level; reality far from the old Europe’s context in which often instead of giving space to groundbreaking ideas that might contribute to the development of culture institutions usually invest on ordinary projects and too much linked with mainstream.

photo : Camil Scorteanu, Conception Lévy .

This year’s edition of the Market was also the occasion for the launch of Digitalart’ http://www.digitalarti.com, interactive online community dedicated to the digital art’s world, which offers information about festivals, artistic projects and publications related to experimental arts. Within this informal environment and the desire to let participants get involved in the possibilities offered by Montreal’s artistic and cultural milieu, like every year during the Market the organizers accompanied the guests to visit the laboratories of Hexagram, institute dedicated to research and creation of project related to new

http://www.elektrafestival.ca/ http://www.hexagram.org/ http://www.sat.qc.ca/

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Imaging Space: Direct Digital Symposium Lucrezia Cippitelli

inaugural day, among important intarnational artists and me, i.e. an art historian. I played the quite awkard role of a person who presents things belonging to the past and then asks to the artists and the public: “And now, what’s on?”.

Golan Levin (designer & theorist) was certainly the most famous person featured at the symposium, also known among the general public, and whose topics were interaction design and man-machine interfaces. He had been invited by the editor of the symposium, Marco Mancuso , to act as critic and theorist exactly on the topic of interaction in the general symposium frame, i.e. where intervention is based on the use of mass media. It was really interesting

As one of the five sections of the new periodical art exhibition and electronical world Direct Digital – edited by Gilberto Caleffi – the Symposium staged last Thursday 28th May in Sala Delfini della Galleria Civica di Modena suggested an analysis on the permeation of art, architecture and mass media in space planning and imaging.

With a quite anglophone title, “From Art to Design and back” , the Symposium aimed at exploring a wide area in which four characters, completely different in education and objectives, faced eachother to offer a point of view on mass media and space invention: Golan Levin, Paolo Rigamonti, Boris Debackere e Lucrezia Cippitelli (that is me).

listening to one of the most renowned artists of international interaction design and assisting to the presentation of his most celebrated projects. At the same time as it always happens when taking part in conferences featuring big personalities a sour taste was left in everybody’s mouth since Golan Levin dwells in his Web site above all upon the theoric side of his work, and the lecture seemed to be rather an

They had been invited to speak at the eve of the exhibition Direct Digital

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informal and even not too enthralling list of his activities.

“increased reality”), in the research field of laboratories as V2, the prototypes developed and programmed by the staff are certanly less tecnologically inviting, but they are becoming very interesting tools for artists (V2′s purpose is to realise prototypes of tools able to satisfy artists’ ideas and researches).

However the question remains: the artist who is struggling with the augmented reality is always in an unstable balance between having fun as hacker (according to Pekka Himanem , a hacker is a person who has fun in opening a computer and looking how it functions and could be used) and the production of tools which are often more interactive games (which are undoubtedly loved by the public) rather than real art works. Where is the artistic project in all that? Boris Debackere tries to talk about it, introducing his analysis on the Cinematic Experience , which also made him produce “Probe” , an art work introduced by Digimag in its last numbers. It is a sort of cinematographic narration which interacts with the behaviour of watchers sitting in the room.

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Boris Debackere, director of the V2 Centre for Unstable Media Laboratory in Rotterdam, one of pillars in the Transmedia Course at the Sint Lukas Accademy in Bruxelles and artist as well, talked on behalf of V2 about the projects realised by his laboratory in the field of the so-called “augmented reality” . In the described researches – among them two of the Dutch artist Marnix De Nijs’ works , i.e. “Exercise in immersion” presented at Deaf in 2007 and the most recent “Exploding Views – Remapping Firenze” (2008) – the attention focuses on wearable machines and softwares, which allow the user/watcher to interact with a space shaped and designed by computers or interactive cinema.

The aim of “Probe” was to analyse the cinematographic world and reveal how the whole cinematic experience is nothing more than direct involvement of watcher’s immagination (according to the

And if the technological research is taking great strides (the industry works now at the production of contact lenses able to make the person who wears them living an 71

Kantian concept of immagination).

This is certainly interesting, even though “Probe” has been a great public success in every exhibition it was displayed (from Sonic Acts in 2008 to the latest Strip Festival ) because everyone (above all children) go nuts in seeing that what happens on the screen and in the audiovisual surroundings changes according to their movements: so the risk of the interactive game is always an undercurrent.

for nothing and definitions are only advertising. What matters most is the fact that architecture is and has always been a medium itself.

It has always been like that, from Egyptian pyramids to Schinkel ‘s Neue Wache through Gropius and Botta . So what is “media architecture”?

Rigamonti says that for the time being it is merely a word and the use of technologies added to architecture has a meaning only if they are really part of the sense construction of architecture itself. A deconstructing example: Times Square in New York is merely a symbol, and adding coloured and moving LEDs desplaying all the time world stock exchange data do not add anything to the building of the most famous crossroads in New York . They are only images which do not give any new information except the statement of their own existence.

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However there are many examples of technology use in contemporary architectural research where technology aims at giving its own sense to the building or construction

Paolo Rigamonti, designer, architect and co-founder of the Milanese studio Limireazero, based his lecture on the discussion and definition of the term “medium”, during the maybe fullest and most inspiring lecture of the symposium. As he had announced shortely before his speech “I’ll be bad and old style” -, Paolo Rigamonti set out first of all a very important point regarding the literature engaged with media-architecture: technology has nothing to do with it, chatter counts

it is installed on. An example: the designers/architects group LabAu ‘s researches in Bruxelles, and above all “Binary Waves”, i.e. panels supplied with LEDs which move and interact with the urban einvironment surrounding them according to the information coming form the very same environment (noise, pollution, 72

movement, ecc.).

purposely excluded as the public noticed the topics of sound and videoart, to engage instead in the idea that the cinematic experience is based on spacial and environmental elements which force the watcher to really try out the cinema.

These elements have become a constant factor in Modern art from historic Avant-gardes on (from Gropius’ Total Theatre to Lucio Fontana). But what happens when artists present their videos during a biennal art exhibition without worrying about the cinematic effect?

How many artitst are nowadays really engaged in this concept?.

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The last but actually the first lecture in the symposium editor’s order was mine. The topics were the environments of contermporary art (the historic one), the cinema and the possibility to show cinema in spaces destined to art. A lecture which

http://www.directdigital.org/

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Sabrina Muzi. About The Body Without Limits Massimo Schiavoni

from her origins, from her fears and loneliness, from the strength of a simple woman, full of life, from her will to make herself heard and to love.

Sabrina feels her social role, a female able to show something, sometimes without any filter, sometimes transfigured. Like in “Tortures” where a hand prevents the artist to see and speak and it cancels and dominates her; a wicked and repressed deed which arises evil thoughts. It is not the image, but the “body of the image” which gets away from obvious meanings to burst into the context that Sabrina creates and suffers. She is the protagonist, against her will, of a metaphorical liberation.

The Italian artist Sabrina Muzi from Marche region, has been living for several years in Bologna, dividing herself between exhibitions and residences from Florida to Corea, between daily life and small joys in which through performatory, photographic, installatory-videos processes and contaminations, she returns us an inner art and aesthetic identities which involve all senses, transuded and amplified through her tiny explosive body.

Obsessed by staying and by doing, as in “Accerchiamento”, vain attempt and pure renunciation. Fears and desires are guided by the awareness of the human limits and the very fact of being bound to the nature of her body, obliges the artist to use creative strategies which almost tend to alienate the reality of life invading in this way the sphere of representation.

Sabrina is visceral in her simulacrum and rational in her dramatization. The suggestive video performance “Mending”, which recalls the

The body as a place of canceled identity, as appropriation of space, as a place of discovery; the body as research and as a direct and symbolic communication instrument, the body as exchange and denunciation commodities. The body as “other”, as a rite. A reconstructed body. A body without limits. Her video-recorded performances arise from far away,

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meticulousness and the gestures of the sculptress Louise Bourgeois, can be considered one of her most moving and refined works. In this video she amasses oranges and she “operates” them using a surgery stitching, artificially intervening so as to mend and almost to “nurse” her sick son.

70′s. Then she let flowers fall naturally from her body almost by magic, intervening on the metropolitan scene by upsetting the daily routine and fixed timetables; enlarged synaesthesias among walks and incomprehensible glances. Until the recent “Remote Body” where we find a strong connection with the natural environment. Indeed in this ancestral work the enlarged body interacts, melts and “builds itself up” using branches and tape. During an afternoon at the end of May I met the artist and I had the opportunity to talk and to reason with her on her work, on the journey she had begun now many years ago.

Massimo Schiavoni: Who was Sabrina Muzi? Who is she now?

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After these early multi-appreciated works, as “Big” for example, where getting dressed and growing bigger becomes rite and sacrifice, in “Ninetta” and “Uneasy Growth” the artist feels the necessity to go among the people and to take possession of them, of us. She performs this, at first, by putting on make-up and successively by selling kisses to the passers-by in the streets of Bologna after a very detailed iconographic and historic research and actually plunging into a narrative “epic” unconsciously recalling Sophie Calle at the beginning of her carrier and Cindy Scherman at the end of the

Sabrina Muzi: Someone who was always in search of something that she didn’t know yet, always carried by a strength she was not really conscious of, but that every time it had pushed her to challenge herself, to bring herself up for discussion again if necessary, trying to look for lands where to stop, where to rediscover and lose herself at the same time. Tension, precariousness, feeling, passion and a certain quantity of obstinacy…I’ve always wanted to find new paths without thinking too much about risks, because I’ve always thought that each emotion has its own language, and each moment has 75

its own way to express itself.

Nowadays she is someone who has learned how to look more in herself from the outside, and maybe also to play a bit with this exchange of roles between really being herself and only imagining herself. I can say that now I have become an evolution of what I was , because actually we don’t change that much, we become just more conscious as a result of the many experiences we have had to cope with in the passing of time. It is through this awareness that everything becomes clearer and you know which way to take.

to develop which little by little “defines” myself, but only at that particular moment.

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Massimo Schiavoni: Where and how did you develop your cultural and artist education? What do you always take with you?

Massimo Schiavoni: How would you define yourself?

Sabrina Muzi: Defining always means to trace out new boundaries, to fix a begin and an end. It is a big responsibility because you have to maintain it without second thoughts. I don’t think it’s worth it, it could also be frustrating to cling to the idea that you have of yourself. I rather prefer, if we really wish to use this term, to “be defined” by what I do. Every time I

Sabrina Muzi: I come from Marche and there I lived the first part of my life. I went to the “Accademia delle Belle Arti” in Macerata, but afterwards I moved to Bologna, so the cultural background where I have grown up mostly, even if I didn’t study there, is the latter. Maybe it can sound trivial, but I would say in response to your question, that dreams are what I always take with me.

work on a new project I see a new image of myself taking form, and sometimes it can be surprising. What I actually mean is that I never start from the idea I have of myself or from what I am or what I would like to show of myself. I just follow a stream, an intuition, and then an imaginary of forms, images, actions, sounds starts

Massimo Schiavoni: What does the video represent for you? And the body?

Sabrina Muzi: The video is both a means and a language towards which I have always felt a strong empathy

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and easiness since the moment I started to use it, by now quite some time ago . I mean, I have always thought that it was just the means through which I could really express what I wanted: In particular, there was a time when I almost only used video in all my works, a kind of necessity to get to the bottom and find out what could be conveyed with an ethereal means, though complete. Every single idea, emotion, intuition has its own way to come out. If I take a picture, or make a video, or a performance, even if all of them are dealing with the same subject, each of them has a different value depending on the means I use. To use one or another is a very accurate choice.

art, coming into relation with the extreme tangible, the body, thaumaturgically reconciles us with our inner self Massimo Schiavoni: In the series “Tortures” in 2001 we go from the cancellation, coming from the outside, of his/her identity and “private” space to a symbolic impossibility of building up and therefore to be. How much and what of you as a woman can we find in all this?

Sabrina Muzi: In this work the relation between the male and female parts is an obvious element, with a definition of roles and the need to break them up. This will come back in other works (“Accerchiamento”, “Zona Sospesa”, “Ninetta”). But the concept goes beyond a gender issue and what stands out is a relationship game in which the parts act their own diversity causing a reciprocal reaction, a tension from which the identity issue emerges. On a social level it has always been difficult for a woman to build up her own public space, this is a

he body, instead, is more a sort of thread than a means/language, a trait d’union, present even when it is absent. It reminds me about the games when we were kids, when we invented how to transform ourselves or how to hide, in other words it is always a discovery. It is interesting to see the unforeseeable emerging from something that we consider familiar and that, for this very reason, we take it for granted. Sadly enough we find this out in illness and it is just through the symbolic representation of ourselves that we can exorcise this physical limit. As it was possible to recover a relation between body and soul through a ritual offer in primitive cultures, in the same way I think that

historical truth, but this has not prevented her from building up her own private space which in time has strengthened her own identity. As far as I am concerned I think I have put into action, since long, a “construction” process which is still going on, where the need of “being” can’t be stopped by a contrasting 77

power. Instead it is able to provoke reactions that inevitably contribute to the forming of his/her own self.

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Massimo Schiavoni: In “Mending” what is the significance of the meticulous operation of stitching oranges as it were human flesh or anyway of having something ” to nurse” ?

mean, under these conditions even the difference between victory or defeat has no meaning at all: when it has to do with the impossibility of giving up his/her own self, even the only act of resistance is worth to protect oneself from the strong antagonism of the other. In a book that I read some time ago, Miguel Benasayag philosopher and activist from Argentine, tells the experience of torture inflicted upon himself and upon his fellow prisoners. He tells about the value given to death when someone has reached the bottom and knows that whatever might happen to him/her, there is nothing heroic, vaunting or ideological in this, it simply serves to give value to your own life, to what you are o have been.

I think that the “building up” of a vital space can be always put into action, even in case of borderline experiences that are prone to cancel any possibility of assertion of his/ her own self.

Sabrina Muzi: “Mending” presents itself as a reparation gesture; it is an action which could go on endlessly, it points out the urgency of the moment, a possibility where the attention is focused on an object, an organic element, that while becoming the main subject of the work opens out to the symbolic representation.

The action can convey different meanings, social, cultural and ecological ones. Or it can have no sense at all, it can open out to the imaginary and become a container full with emotions and spirits. I think that this second hypothesis is the first reaction to this work. After that, there are all the other possibilities conveying sense, but usually in the beginning it is acknowledged on an emotional and psychological level.

This is the natural drift of all my work : give some hints of strong communicative impact and at the same time expecting to relate with the most intimate part of ourselves. In another work “Rosso di sera” the action is similar and opposite at the same time: there, the “cure” was

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based on closing a split, in a sort of reconciliation, here the solution is found in cuts, a new painful opening but probably full of hope. To open and to close oneself up, to propose oneself and draw back as the beating throb of our breath.

moment after moment emerges from that action. This means that any “attempt” to transform reality, as wearing lots of clothes at the same time, or shutting oneself up inside a wall made of people, has its value just in the development of an apparently “normal” gesture that in its very growth also shows a physical exertion and consequently a direct link to his/her own body.

Massimo Schiavoni: In “Big”, as in “Accerchiamento” o in “Rimozioni”, the constant straining and repetition is evident as in a rite, simple actions conveying great empathy and communicativeness from the social and cultural point of view . Then in 2004, in “Ninetta”, we see you walking on the platform selling kisses to customers or in “Uneasy Growth” losing flowers among the people. Tell us about this passage towards interaction-happening with the public.

t is very important for me to transmit this vitality rather than the idea behind it, which anyway comes already in a direct way. This is the reason why I choose simple elements for my work. This immediacy, which contains in itself the seeds of interpretation, needs a temporal processing to make it alive. Hence the need for the performance and for the video. The shift to interaction, at this point, is natural, it is not only the action that unrolls in front of the videocamera where the final product is the video, but the performance that develops in the streets involving the public. A new element is created, the reaction of the people, sometimes “Uneasy actively involved as is the case of Growth” “Ninetta”, other times involved just on a psychological level as in where even a single glance meeting your gesture contributes to characterize the action.

Sabrina Muzi: The element of repetition as a sort of ritual comes back in many works I have done. It is just like a dilated time which in its potentially indefinite duration gives value and emphasize that gesture. As you have said, I like working with simple actions but with the purpose to put them on a different symbolic level of intelligibility that, in a way, will make them unique. I am not so much interested in the conceptual idea but rather in the vital process that

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research of an empathy with the natural element but at the same time it wish to suggest a past or future apocalyptic vision of the world. Even by establishing a link it actually defines a limit as well. The fact of being tied up is an attempt of fusion but at the same time of constraint.

The electronic sounds I use in the video feed this dichotomy, they create a distance-attraction between an archaic imagery that refers to the primordial rite of the relation humanity-nature and the vision of a human potential drastically farther and farther away from nature.

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Massimo Schiavoni: In your last work “Remote Body” you bind yourself with paper tape to some branches so that you become a sole element with nature. What have you rediscovered with this action and where is your artistic poetics going?

In the performance-installation “Corpo variabile” , the situation is similar but it emerges through the construction of a tree-structure with which I interact by becoming part of it. Over the last few years, much more than in the past, I have been working with more media, the same idea can be shown as a video, a performance, a series of drawings or photos or as an installation. Each form is autonomous, but as parallel roads perspectively stretched at infinity which at a certain moment meet, I draw aside and observe the accidental point where everything converge and blend together. I can’t say exactly where I’m heading to, but I think it is more and more important not to start from the abstraction of an idea or from the representation of a concept. I carry on in my research of a space where

Sabrina Muzi: I consider this activity as a sort of valve that connects a precise phase of my research with another one which is just looming. In some previous works the organic-natural element was already present, but recently this relationship between body and nature has become more and more intimate, and consequently also the interest on the body concept opens up and becomes something not exclusively bound to the human being. Initially this has emerged from a series of photographic works, images of vegetable elements that merged into human figures and successively also from pictures where only the vegetable-natural world was present. “Remote Body” is the

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thought is a considerable part of a wider sphere of cultural and natural relationships whose interactions remarkably determine our relation to reality : a sensitive world based on our personal and public history and that,

through our imagery, is able to create each time an emotional state.

www.sabrinamuzi.it

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Blender And 3dwithin Nearly…everybody’s Reach Marco Riciputi

by Ton Roosendaal, the Dutch creator of Blender; his history begins by the middle of the Nineties, when the programme was developed and then put on the market by Ton’s company, the Not a Number, without success.

The company went bankrupt, but its bankruptcy started, in that case, an unexpected history.

“Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License”. Behind this synthetic definition opening the official site of “Blender” free software and open source, not only a programme for 3D modelling hides, but also an authentic work philosophy and a community of users that has developed thanks to the opportunities that new technologies have offered in many fields. Blender will be the protagonist of a very interesting workshop in the period of warm up of the next Hackmeeting in Milan , which will take place at the Bicocca university in June.

The Blender Foundation was created with the aim of promoting the development of the programme and in 2002 the “Free Blender” campaign was parallelly launched; in a few weeks it managed to gather 100.000 € (almost 70.000 £) and this amount was enough to redeem the programme from the old financiers from the NaN and make it an open source.

So everyone on the Internet can use, today, Blender, which is commercially free of charge, they can distribute and modify it, whereas, around the software, a community that is blendernation.com structured in the blenderartist.org and in the has grown; moreover, there is an institute in Amsterdam that deals with the commercial part and the

How can it survive on the market? It must not cost anything.

This seems to be the solution found 82

development of the open projects.

last few days, instead, the call to create the team that will work on the “Durian” project has been launched; they will produce a 3D short film with fantasy atmospheres that will involve the Dutch cartoonist Martin Lodewijk as well.

An important but marginal community.

“Working on Big Buck Bunny was exhausting, hard, beautiful and constructive. One of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had”.

This was the opinion of Enrico Valenza, a freelance illustrator with a long experience, who for some years has been devoting himself to computer graphics, too. He started by using exactly Blender, because it is free.

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Short films and videogames.

3D animation, visual effects and games are the use field of Blender, which tries to compete with feepaying giants like Autodesk Maya, managing to succeed to some extent: for example it was used in the phase of previsualization of the movie Spiderman 2. However, Blender is mainly used for the Open Projects, where temporary teams of artists that are recruited as freelancers work on each individual project with a double aim: to develop something creatively valid and at the same time to improve the software.

After taking part in the last few weeks of work on Elephants Dream , Valenza joined the “Peach Project” as a Lead Artist. It took six months of work to produce, in a record time, eight minutes of 3D animation, with “funny and furry” characters, along the lines of the planetary success of productions like Ice Age . It was very hard, but the team’s work was praised during the Holland Animation Film Festival and gave Enrico Valenza the opportunity to collaborate with important people, for example with the “Spark Digital Entertainment” Roman company of visual effects,

Up to now there are three finished open projects. “Orange” and “Peach”, which produced two short 3D animations, Elephants Dream in 2006 and Big Buck Bunny in 2008, and “Apricot”, which was used to develop Yo! Frankie , a videogame that has been on the market since 2008. In the 83

with which he still works.

use Blender, and people must take into account that, as in every artistic experience, the use of the tool itself does not guarantee good results. I want to remind when the coming out of was accompanied by sentences like: “Don’t like the ending? Change it! “.

Try then to download and modify the open movie: probably, you will not feel like doing it any longer!

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The role of the community in the development of the open projects is still a bit marginal. “Sometimes we asked for help for codes to implement, or to decide the final title of the short film, choosing it with a vote in a shortlist of suitable titles”, revealed Enrico Valenza, “but indeed it was we who took the final decisions”.

http://www.enricovalenza.com http://www.blender.org http://blenderartists.org http://www.elephantsdream.org http://www.bigbuckbunny.org http://durian.blender.org/about

Although it is open and participatory, many competences are requested to

http://www.yofrankie.org

Elephants Dream

Blender

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_augmentology 1[l]0[l]1_:interface Between Two Worlds Mark Hancock

development of virtual personae.

Using a range of platforms that include World of Warcraft, EVE Online and Second Life, as well as the multifarious social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.

The written reports explore the themes of the duality of living within a digital environment and also in the ‘real world.’ The blog entry titled, Reality Mixing + the Geospecificity Complex, questions the uneasy

The _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ project reaches out into a multitude of networked environments, like a multi-tendrilled creature, it explores and reports back information to a central hub, located at the _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ blog.

Existing in the virtual, the task is to explore other synthetic worlds and attempt to reflect back something of the nature of living within them and our own world. The resultant collection of projects and ideas can be considered a “Synthetic Reality Manual” as Mez Breeze, who initiated the project, describes it.

relationship we have between the two worlds. In fact, the notion of In Real Life (IRL), as a way to express our location, Mez suggests, is more often used by those who have a negative attitude towards on-line worlds. There is a sense of there being a hegemonic status attached to the different environments, with the off-line one being the most important. Not that those who use on-line environments would consider Second Life and others to be ‘more’ important, but perhaps there needs to be a consideration of the importance of being active within them: for them to be considered more than just playgrounds.

Mez, along with Joseph DeLappe, Shane Hinton, Trevor Dodge and Greg J. Smith are developing and testing ideas that come from explorations of on-line encounters and the 85

AFK (Away From Keyboard), “indicates an inclusiveness regarding geophysical and synthetic states.

Whereas irl evokes hierarchical connotations in relation to reality definitions, afk indicates a fluctuating, fluid involvement.”

him on the march. The physical walking, along with the continual immersion, lead to what he described as “a great sense of accomplishment feeling content and quite frankly looking forward to a much needed rest! I had completed a rather fascinating journey both in the physical and conceptual sense. In the days that followed the end of the reenactment, this feeling of euphoria was slowly overtaken by a sense of melancholy – I found myself both saddened and conflicted for the march to be concluded.”

On completion of the march, he built several different sized versions of his avatar, including 17′ tall reproduction from cardboard and hot glue. This mixing of the two worlds, blending them both physically through the use of the treadmill and sculpture, and the emotional connection with his avatar (reflected in the request from a fellow walker to ‘not kill Gandhi’) draws these ideas away from being just theoretical standpoints and wordplay, and towards the realisation that there is an emotional connection being made in the digital world. More so than just the reaction to a Facebook update concerning the well-being of a friend (their relationship status or their latest night out), we are beginning to develop a sort biological/mental cross-connection where we might recall something taking place, and not be able to remember the location of

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It is this desire to create a smoother interface between the worlds, that drives the _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ research and practise. Instead of the jarring disconnection from one to the other, there are overlaps and geological connections.

Joseph DeLappe, as part of his Eyebeam residency, completed a 240 mile march across Second Life using an avatar of Gandhi. This reenactment of the Salt Satyagraha that Gandhi made in protest against the leverage of a salt tax during the British occupation of the country, was made using a treadmill connected to Second Life. Six days of every week, DeLappe walked on the treadmill and invited others in Second Life, to join 86

it. Like a recollection of something that seems real but actually happened in a dream. The emotional connection is the thing that is real, not just the location. In this way, we might begin to realise how much of our lives are mental activities, rather than physical ones.

on-line personality extends and breaks this traditional rational formation of who we are. Indeed, Mez argues that, with many gamers having multiple personae on World of Warcraft and other platforms, this spread would normally result in schizophrenia. But instead it seems that these multiple personalities, ” represent a user’s ability for comprehensive immersion and allow for seamless and aggregational engagement. There is room for an overlap of these constructions including the potentiality to learn extensively from these synthetic Identity formulations.

The blog entry, Identity Ecologies + Avatar Formations, explores further this sense of ‘where’ our identities reside. Approached from the perspective of traditional Social Psychology, the way we identify ourselves is through physical landmarks and biological traits, but an

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that all they will find are the worst traits of human existence: trivia, sex and mundane ramblings. reads like the field notes of an anthropology team, leading expeditions into known but uncharted territories. These territories are both psychological and geophysical, even though the coordinates may only exist in a virtual world. The research notes are continually being collated and published as new explorations are made. As well as the existing collaborators, there is scope for new members to join the expeditions and make field notes. _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ is a Synthetic Reality Manual for our digital era.

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The very name of the project, _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, with its combination of 101, referring to George Orwell’s’ novel, 1984 and textspeak LOL (Laugh Out Loud), contains within it the essence of what it aims to achieve. In the novel 1984, Room 101 contains all of the possible horrors that a person can imagine. It becomes a reflection of whatever it is that you fear the most. It is used here as a taunt to those who believe that there is no need to venture into the virtual,

http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/resear ch/

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_

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Cinemahacking: Interview To Paolo Gioli Claudia D'Alonzo

beginning of the 70′s, passing through painting initially and later through photography. In cinema he finds instruments and linguistic characteristics with which he can build his own personal visual laboratory. A workshop made up of played and researched procedures, on the brink between the determination prior to the project, and error, the flippant provocation of chance. Gioli is an auteur not only in the sense of creator and developer of his own cinematography work but also as an experimenter and inventor of techniques and procedures. His relationship with technique is never technical, and never celebrates the medium as a medium per se.

Technique according to Gioli is a standard procedure, an action of knowledge that in turn produces new and often unexpected knowledge.

Paolo Gioli is one of the reference Auteurs of Underground Italian Cinema. He has experimented in his research on images and vision, painting, photography and cinema, deconstructing and often inventing techniques, reproduction and shooting methods ex-novo. The 45th “Mostra del Nuovo Cinema” (New Cinema Exhibition) in Pesaro, which is held between the 21 st and 29 th of June 2009, with a great homage dedicated to the Auteur with a film exhibition and a photographic exhibition, held in Palazzo Gradari in Pesaro, and the publication of a volume, curated by the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Centre for Experimental Cinema Foundation), are among the most recent celebrations of his work.

Techniques like the pinhole camera, photo finish and stop motion animation are methods of research, channels through which he can explore the nature and functioning of Paolo light, vision and movement.

Gioli dismantles the cinematographic language structures; moved by lively curiosity, he looks into mechanisms of

Paolo Gioli lands in film at the 89

cinema and tries to understand, steal and contaminate the functioning of that “black viewing box” that is the film camera. A research that the auteur learns through the history of cinema, a history he has made his own, through a practice and dexterity rich with knowledge, thanks to which Gioli has retraced, reproduced and reinvented the experiences of the fathers of cinema, which he learned from books.

production and perception of cinema imposed by standardized production where too strict for you?

Paolo Gioli: I realised this through something that may seem banal but which was decisive: when I realised that I could not immediately control what I had just shot. If someone does research on images he must be able to immediately see the shots. Reading the history of cinema, I read the things that everyone had read but that evidently no other auteur had ever taken into consideration. I asked myself: how did the first people who made films develop them? At the time there was no laboratory: Meliés, Lumière, Edison did not go to a laboratory, they were their own laboratory. Cinema was created through them and they had found a way to develop their own things by themselves. And reading French texts on the history of cinema I found what I imagined to find. At the beginning there were bits that they threw into some development liquid and developed them like that, like a bowl of spaghetti, just to verify whether the material developed or not. Then they thought of building a can in which they rolled the film, they left it there soaking in a bucket, they waited 6 or 7 minutes, just as if they were developing film. Then they put it in water to wash it, they unravelled it and hung it out to dry. After having read these things I began to do the

Gioli himself reinforces this statement and connects his work to history, to pre-cinema, but at the same time, in a much less aware fashion and refusing every comparison with digital technology, Gioli anticipates contemporary hacking intended not only as a deconstruction of the instrument but also and mostly as a construction practice of a new meanings and knowledge through technology.

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Claudia D’Alonzo: When did you begin to understand that the modalities of 90

same.

film. Which is what happens in the laboratory, the printer does exactly that. From then on I began working autonomously, even on duration. This notion that a film must last an hour and a half, derives from focus group tests on audiences, they noticed that spectators have had enough after two hours. This notion of an hour and a half created itself, it’s an old story. But this is true for commercials too: if they are bad those two minutes are unbearable, if they’re good you never want them to end.

Claudia D’Alonzo: So what interested you was controlling the development phase and print phase?

Paolo Gioli: Development is one thing.

In development you see what you have done. When you have a negative you’re alright, you edit the negative and as you go you accumulate 6 or 7 metres , you realise that everything changes. Everyone said to me: but cinema film is different, it’s not like photographic film, it’s different. I didn’t believe them, so I bought some film, and I developed it as if it were any old photo film and I saw it was the same thing. Everyone was so obsessed with technicality… they all felt these technical barriers, complicated stuff full of secrets: it’s so stupid. Film is film. In other words I had to do it myself and not listen to what other people said.

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Then I realised that I could make a film from morning to evening! I would shoot a piece, if I liked it I would edit it, piece by piece, and so forth. Once I had finished I would print everything in a laboratory. I printed some pieces myself, I would make the positive with an old camera, I used it like Lumière did, he used the camera to shoot and print: you put the new film in contact with the developed negative, you shoot a white light, for example from a wall, and you impress the positive

Claudia D’Alonzo: Yes, but even in cinema there are functional parameters and standards in order to make an industrial product of mass consumption.

Paolo Gioli: For cinema this is really annoying. If you present a 2-minute film they define it as a little film. There are no little films, it’s a film! It doesn’t matter how long it is. These things irritate me.

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Claudia D’Alonzo: What did you watch, what kind of movies interested you?

theme of film history and the influences on your work, what other films do you remember as being fundamental in your training, your knowledge of cinematographic language, amongst contemporary auteurs?

Paolo Gioli: I was not interested in cinema, I watched and have watched a lot of movies but I just didn’t consider it. I liked Soviet cinema, all of the historic avant-garde. I remember presentations of films by Richter, in the Cavallino gallery in Venice . I saw those rectangles that moved on the screen, that painting… he was a painter. I said to myself: so I can do that too. I can transfer form onto film, it’s not a betrayal, everything can be contaminated. So you can paint, make movies, and perhaps put the two together. This gave me courage.

Thanks to avant-garde I understood that I could be free to do anything.

Most of the New American Cinema was based on that, they were all Cocteau film enthusiasts, and perhaps they took the worst parts of his work.

Americans have always been able to “watch” well. Just like they did with Pop Art, they saw Dadaism in Europe and transferred it to their reality – bravo. They knew how to do what had not been successful in France with Nouveau Realism. Americans are very good in taking and selecting the right culture and making it their own. But for cinema their references came from Europe , obviously, they couldn’t come from anywhere but here.

Paolo Gioli: Michael Snow for sure, with his film “Wavelength”. I think it’s the most important film in the whole history of experimental cinema. I remember when I saw it for the first time in London , at the National Film Theatre; I was astonished, I immediately thought that I wished I had done that movie. Other films that I wished I could have done were the first Cassavetes films. But when I watched these films, instead of losing heart by comparing myself to them, they gave me strength. It was my own personal challenge against myself in order to be at the same level as those works of art. I thought that these auteurs had really expensive equipment, whereas I would just get a piece of wood, make a hole in it and make a camera.

Claudia D’Alonzo: How did you begin making your movies, working with film?

Paolo Gioli: It was in Rome , mostly thanks to my encounter with Alfredo Leonardi. At the time my experience with the Cooperativa del Cinema Indipendente (Independent Cinema

Claudia D’Alonzo: Let’s stay on the 92

Cooperative) was over, but I met him in Rome, along with Massimo Bacigalupo, Gianfranco Barruchello, Alberto Grifi. Alfredo helped me a lot, he gave me a lot of material, mostly American, because he had been to the States for a book for Feltrinelli. We were close friends, he slept in my study, there were a series of intricate private issues. He helped me a lot but in the Roman context things were running out. It was the time of the Brigatisti (brigades) and all the offtheatres, all those experiences that in Rome were outside official contexts were prosecuted as places of crime and for druggies. Many places were closed down, made to disappear and reshape a whole circuit because of the laws on terrorism and because of those bloody terrorists. A whole generation and period were absorbed by this, politicised and dispersed, or eliminated, a lot of centres disappeared, there was nothing more.

Many others were integrated, they needed State funds. The institutions gave funding and in this way they neutralised some of those circuits that seemed dangerous because they were outside of the State. In this way a certain environment became dormant and lost. This happened in film too. There was a new wave of New American Cinema, and so Jonas Mekas was smart and, wanting the represent the whole world, he had work sent to him from Italy . Alfredo

and the others got in touch with him and sent their films, which Mekas did not like at all, but he took them as a representation of Italian Underground Cinema, as he has often recollected.

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Claudia D’Alonzo: You lived in two important contexts for the whole experimental cinema scene, New York at the end of the Sixties and Rome during the second have of the following decade…

Paolo Gioli: I wasn’t making movies when I was in New York . At that time I was mostly drawing. I followed the circuit of little cinemas that showed these “forbidden” films, underground films. But from there I understood a lot of things. For example, wandering around the bay of New York at night, in quite dangerous places, by chance I saw a little cinema with a line of people outside. A lot of the people waiting in line were holding these little boxes in their hands, I just thought they were strange spectators.

I sneaked inside too. I found out that 93

those spectators were really auteurs and that the boxes where boxes of Super8 film. You didn’t know what was going to come out of it, the people in line gave their films to the projectionist. At a certain point the police ruptured into the cinema, everyone out, turn everything off, identify everyone present. I had a tourist visa and was terrified.

dualism of Eros-Thanatos in your way of perceiving the body and eroticism?

I’m thinking of an example of a film of yours that is a homage to Marilyn…

Paolo Gioli: With regards the Marilyn the reaffirmation is quite direct, as she died tragically. In some images a scar can be seen on her body, a scar from an operation she had recently had.

She had put a sign on those pictures, she didn’t want them to be published.

They were published soon after her death. So death was in the middle of that film, but it anticipated me. The subject of choice is merely by chance, taken from books, as for other works I have done. I often say that I animate ink, because the point is just this: if there’s a sequence in a book you already have a movie. I like to look at a sequence of photos on a book and imagine it in movement, it’s already in movement. You can give back the book, close it, you have a movie, something that moves. Sometimes I imagine that “Filmarilyn” can be a film that was never shot about her, about her death, that could have been found. What’s in the book is a preanimation, the sequence of pictures, which is distributed between the pages. I had to take various pieces to give a reasonable movement, the most linear movement possible. I tried to connect the frames to give movement, a natural arc. The film is not just pure movement, from frame to frame, it’s a completely new

Claudia D’Alonzo: So even in America there was not all this freedom that people imagine. When you read about that era it seems as though things were so simple, very free and shared, even in the management of spaces created in the most unthinkable places…

Paolo Gioli: No, all of Mekas’s exhibitions were very organised, official. But then there were as many autonomous places, pontoons and barges where you could sleep too.

There were film slide projections, mostly in Super8. Most of these were psychedelic films that implied the use of various substances during the course of the evening. I never used anything like that but all the possible substances available at the time were shared right in front of me.

Claudia D’Alonzo: In your work the presence of the body is very important, and is often accompanied by a reaffirmation of its decline, of death. Do you recognise this classic

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construction.

develop certain cerebral apparatus and make them work better. You know how to observe and you know how to get by. It’s great to start from nothing. Even if the result isn’t how you planned it and you throw it away, you haven’t bought a camera, you haven’t bought anything, you haven’t done anything. It’s always a surprise: at the end you worked with nothing, there isn’t even any film, just photographic paper. You’ve erased everything. If you look at photography studios they are full of objects, collections of equipment, a fetishism of technique! If I buy some instrument and I realise that I made a mistake, that I don’t need it, I give it away, I rid myself of all that which is not necessary. Even if they were to take film away from me, I would still find a way to make images; you can really work with nothing.

More generally speaking my way of working on the body comes from photography. I have never perceived it in an erotic or aesthetic way, if in some works the body appears to be erotic it is because it already was to begin with. On the other hand, every one of us stood against a wall with a diffused light, relaxed, looks awful.

And three-quarters of my images are shot without lenses, just with a pinhole camera. It’s not simple: all the effort made in photographic technique in order to put in a viewfinder in order to see, control the shot, focus, is denied through this choice.

When I began to use the pinhole camera I thought that everyone did so systematically, but when I talked about it I realised that a lot of people didn’t even know what it was.

Photographers should use it, even if just for personal curiosity. I would advise it as a cure, as a kind of therapy for six or seven days. I assure you that after having tried it it’s difficult to leave this technique aside when you realise what you can do with a piece of photographic paper.

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Claudia D’Alonzo: Can you explain this choice of reducing shooting techniques to a pinhole camera?

Paolo Gioli: It’s not easy, but in this way you can augment your capacity for observation, you’re capable of measuring without systems, you

Claudia D’Alonzo: Another interesting 95

aspect of your way of doing film is that the imperfections deriving from the technique become characteristics of your images, a stylistic characteristic of your films.

technological innovations become a limitation for many artists: I know a lot of them who get blocked on their work because they cannot buy the latest digital instrument on sale. In general I tell them “come to my studio and we’ll solve the problem, we’ll find a way”. I think an auteur must always have something in his mind to do or to say and then decide what he needs, and if this thing doesn’t exist or costs too much, then he must do it himself.

The capacity of building an instrument cannot but add to and glorify the work you do. I’m not interested in comparing myself with digital technology. Many artists work with engineers and technicians, in laboratories like Sony, but you must already be famous in order to work that way.

Paolo Gioli: Yes. For example, the shaking is a characteristic of a shot taken in this way, you cannot recreate it artificially. You can only do it with this camera, because it is a camera, there’s animation, a movement from top to bottom. A movement of a camera, from top to bottom, that in reality has never existed, because the shot is fixed on a static subject: even the film doesn’t move. This is interesting, the camera itself becomes movement, an ultra-movement. This is proto-cinema, something that precedes cinema.

Claudia D’Alonzo: This method of working in my opinion creates a connection between your experimentation on cinematographic and photographic technique and the approach of many artists who work with electronic and digital techniques toward technology. It seems to me that you have in common the desire to not be content with the available techniques and like creating your own instruments, reinventing procedures.

What do you think?

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Claudia D’Alonzo: Not only though.

There are auteurs who write their own software or design and assemble hardware for their installations or instruments with which they create

Paolo Gioli: I think that you should never lose the dexterity of artistic work. And I think that often the

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images or sounds. Others take preexisting machines apart and modify them to obtain what they want from the instrument; I don’t think this approach is very different to your own, the methods and instruments are different but not the attitude, the way of relating to the medium. I think this is true for the more experimental auteurs of the electronic scene.

Just think, it’s a method that I, a dickhead from Rovigo , invented! It’s fundamental to do tests, that’s why I think that dexterity must not be lost as it takes you to the discovery of things you never even imagined, many times thanks to accidents, to errors, that you make your own. One thing that frightens me in electronic technology is the obsolescence of instruments. It’s dangerous: it seems to me that the continuous new instruments are a limit and not a stimulus, they do not give creativity time to be just that, creative. The risk is that electronic engineers are more creative than the artists themselves and another risk it that the artists are sucked into the big multinationals of electronics. All this in my opinion is very dangerous; it’s more beautiful to surprise people with nothing.

Paolo Gioli: I don’t like the word “experimental”. It gives a sense of precariousness and indefiniteness.

The works that are more often classified as being experimental are finished works: the experiment and the research are in the reconstruction of the case history of the work, from how it was made. This is interesting and is experimentation, but not the work per se which is the end of a path and is finished. Even painters test things, use different techniques. I did some photographs for example by putting photographic paper in my hand and impressing it from the hole that is created by making a fist. This procedure is experimental, it doesn’t even exist in photographic history.

http://www.paologioli.it http://www.pesarofilmfest.it

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Douglas Gordon: The Time Of Narration Francesco Bertocco

shifts the function of filmic timing on another level, showing thus a new perspective from which looking at a visual text already known (“Psycho 24 Hours”, 1993): what’s at stake is the willingness to accept a new function of the work in our collective imagination, and a new analysis of it as a function of the new discoveries in the arts fields.

In the works of video artist Douglas Gordon – one of the most important “visual artists” of his generation, awarded with the prestigious Turner Prize in 1996 when he was just 30 years old – the timing of movie narration gets twisted by a new device, that modifies its extension, its message, and the perception of the action it encloses.

The way Douglas Gordon decides to exhibit his works, follows the general idea to carry the audience into the projection, as a surface where images are played, and consequentially as a layer of the exposition itself. In this context, projection is transformed into a multi-sensory object (sight, hearing and touch), where interaction is absolute. The body of the moving image changes, the audience looks at it disfigured, elongated, overturned, smothered by the reproduction (“Bootleg”), space reaches them quickly, first estranging them from the “well-known”, then involving them on an emotional level, in an instinctively and viscerally captivating performance.

The video processing transforms the movie into a new and vast temporal platform, where normal time distribution to which we are used, is twisted by its same images. It is not casual that Douglas Gordon himself defines his work as a search of the unconscious of the movie, a layer not immediately perceivable, which exists only when the movie is de-structured.

Douglas Gordon

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the first years of the century.

The literary cliché of the “double”, is developed through the multiplication by analogy of the projected paintings: two surfaces (which again stresses the dualism) on which the transformation of Dr.Jekill into Mr.Hyde is projected, on one surface in the negative, and on the other one in the original colours version. On of the two scenes slightly precedes the other temporally. The image in the negative, the double, Mr.Hyde, precedes of just a few seconds the original, Dr.Jekill. The impact of the installation is quite strong. The rawness of the actor is shown through the historical time of the action, and leads us into an age where reality was strongly featured in movies. The morphing of the protagonist is realized through a suggestive trick, halfway between grotesque and naive, which uses the strongest representations of human anguishes (like in Expressionism).

Douglas Gordon slows down the time of the action almost to stillness, sculpture, so that the character is realized in space, with the insistence of a palpable image, pressing upon the psychological suggestion of the observer (the arts’ – not the film’s – audience ).

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In my opinion, two are the relevant time constructions in Douglas Gordon‘s artistic and cinematographic works: the extension of time in the movie so as to confront the time of filmic narration itself, and the extension of time in the movie to confront with real time. Both of them have been represented, in two distinctive works: “Confession of a Justified Sinner” e “5 Year Drive-in”.

In the first, the use of filmic material belongs to a kind of second level of the artist’s search, where the movie is de-structured and presented in completely autonomous fragments. A part of the movie is chosen to be emblematic and meaningful, relating to a tradition of memories already consumed and historicized (“Through a looking glass”, 1999), or so that they have a strongly iconographic value, which destabilize the audience.

Douglas Gordon chooses the myth of Dr.Jekill and Mr.Hyde, particularly in a renown cinematographic work from

The paintings come one after the other in a painstakingly dilated time.

The two times of the film, identical as the are as far as images are 99

concerned, recall each other. One waits for the other, foresees it, announces it. Both are realized on the same level, in the same fiction, reinventing themselves in the film, for the film.

Unity bursts into a cluster of almost motionless images, clung to the time of narration which suddenly switched off. The context of this work wants to be like the movie’s setting, swinging between irony and drama, as if we were watching a theatrical representation of the main character stripped off and forced to reveal himself. With an ironical air, this cinema goes back – for the most part – to a cinema “verité”, in a way stronger than any other previous attempt of self-reflexive cinema.

Language itself is so crude, that what remains of the movie is the sculpted set up, bulky and suggestive. Douglas Gordon is able to consider cinema with a deep objectivity, through the element that gives cinema its main structure: time.

Douglas Gordon shows us a section of the movie that becomes a monument, which morphs into a carving, redefined into the insubstantial space of the film. To say it like Tarkovski would, Douglas Gordon carves time, no the natural one, but the cinematographic one, subdues it to a new force which catalyzes and absorbs the audience’s perception, redirecting them towards a purely plastic dimension.

Time in cinema, is the closer connection between arts and life: it can reveal to us the strength of real actions, but also enables us to reflect on them and their nature. When the terms are decomposed, isolated, the whole supporting structure regenerates infinitesimally through images, that, dissenting as they can be, cling onto time and sculpt it.

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In the other work, “5-years drive-in”, we watch the epic confrontation between time as suggested by the movie and time actually elapsed. The five years which pass in the narration are fully shown, without cuts. This way, fiction is deformed by real time,

These two works highlight the problem of objectivity in cinema, like an entity transforming into space, just when time loses its narrative necessity. Cinema lends itself to the purest plasticity, revealing itself in the

and is forced to reveal itself as a plastic, fragmented and illusory work.

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formation of images which are still and left on a time substrate, forced to disillusion the audience on the most sincere form through which cinema fascinates us: the direct participation to life.

http://www.lostbutfound.co.uk/

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Link index Raster Noton Shopping Style http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=423 http://www.raster-noton.net/ http://www.alvanoto.com/ http://www.carstennicolai.com/ http://www.myspace.com/benderbyetone http://www.e-flux.com/ Mapping Festival http://www.mappingfestival.com The Science And Art Of Complex Systems The Murder Of Crows http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=818 http://www.cardiffmiller.com http://www.tba21.org/ http://www.musikwerke-bildender-kuenstler.de/ http://www.freunde-guter-musik-berlin.de http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de/ htp://www.maerzmusik.de%20 Walking In The City With Christina Kubisch http://www.christinakubisch.de/index_en.htm http://www.soundohm.com/christina-kubisch-2/ http://www.dieschachtel.com/editions/ds3.htm 102

The Sound Ecosystems Of Agostino Di Scipio http://xoomer.virgilio.it/adiscipi/ From Cfu To Funen: Interview With Jakob Jakobsen http://www.funenartacademy.com/ http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk A_ctivism http://www.critical-art.net/books/index.html 50 Years After Baron Snow’s Two Cultures http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/5273453/Fifty-years-onCP-Snows-Two-Cultures-are-united-in-desperation.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227066.700-science-and-art-stilltwo-cultures-divided.html?full=true http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=393 Science Is Sexy: Felice Frankel http://www.imageandmeaning.org/gallery/image3.htm http://web.mit.edu/felicef/ The Aware And Creative Technology Of Goto10 http://goto10.org/ The Digital Market Of Elektra http://www.digitalarti.com/ http://www.elektrafestival.ca/ http://www.hexagram.org/ http://www.sat.qc.ca/

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Imaging Space: Direct Digital Symposium http://www.directdigital.org/ Sabrina Muzi. About The Body Without Limits http://www.sabrinamuzi.it Blender And 3dwithin Nearly…everybody’s Reach http://www.enricovalenza.com http://www.blender.org http://blenderartists.org http://www.elephantsdream.org http://www.bigbuckbunny.org http://durian.blender.org/about http://www.yofrankie.org _augmentology 1[l]0[l]1_:interface Between Two Worlds http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/ Cinemahacking: Interview To Paolo Gioli http://www.paologioli.it http://www.pesarofilmfest.it Douglas Gordon: The Time Of Narration http://www.lostbutfound.co.uk/

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